Chinyere e. oteh and dail chambers, yeyo arts collective: gya community art gallery library room, saint louis, missouri, 2010
Sustainable Sisterhood is the friendship and professional bond forged by Dail Chambers and Chinyere E. Oteh beginning in 2009. Over the years, we have built collectives and cooperatives, raised our children together, traveled to attend + lead holistic and Black centered trainings, lived together, grown food and cooked for each other, attended each other's births, and learned how to be leaders in the public eye.
We've shared countless laughs and tears, sleepless nights, and raucous celebrations. We have provided platforms for many to launch their careers. As always, the self work, the mothering work, and the DREAM ACTIVATION continues. This autumn, we are embarking on a regenerative archive intensive where we will begin to organize, digitize, preserve, and make accessible our personal and community arts practices. This includes the work we have done together as founders of Cowry Collective, Yeyo Arts Collective, as birth workers, teaching artists, and Dail Chambers' art + cultural anthropology practice. An emerging librarian archivist, Chinyere will lend her MLIS graduate school training and current repository coordination experience while Dail brings her praxis of sustainable living rooted in memory and community care - a living archive indeed.
chi + dail 2024
Goals:
To compile a digital archive and material collection that is centered on the collaboration and collective organizing work of two women of African and Indigenous descent from the years of 2010-2020 as a demonstration model for self preservation, emerginging economy and mutual care.
To compile a contemporary working group and workshop curriculum using the books and media resources gathered.
To create direct pathways/distribution for the archives of Yeyo Arts Collective and Cowry Collective in tandem and individually.
To uplift Unique stories of Black American Mother storytellers of diverse media.
Dail Chambers and ChINYERE E. OTEH participating in “People’s Joy parade” with their children, and neighbors. saint louis, missouri 2014