Charmaine Minniefield
Feature Article
Saving Praise Houses Before Their African Lineage Is Forgotten
The New York Times
November 2023

Excerpt from the article:

“For Charmaine Minniefield, a visual artist who divides her time between Atlanta and Gambia, praise houses are a way to honor ancestors like her great-grandmother Ora Lee Fuqua, who was born on a sharecropping plantation in Kentucky and taught her the ring shout, “a full body rhythm prayer.” The practice survived the Middle Passage from Africa to America, but often had to be performed clandestinely. The shout thrives today as a buoyant finale to worship services in Gullah Geechee and Black faith communities.

Congregants circle counterclockwise, fervent in their call-and-response shouts and praises while stamping their feet on the floor to create what Minniefield calls “a communal drum.” The shout was “conceived in Africa and born on American plantations,” said Griffin Lotson, who traces his Gullah Geechee family back seven generations and manages the famed Gullah Geechee Ring Shouters in Darien, Ga. Two years ago, Minniefield started the Praise House Project, erecting temporary structures commemorating Black identity, resistance and strength — from enslavement to the present, which she positions in places where Black history and culture have been erased. She calls it “place-keeping.”

Her first praise house opened on Juneteenth 2021 at the African American Burial Grounds in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery, where the individual graves of more than 800 enslaved people were disinterred and moved to an unmarked mass grave (the location was discovered in 2016). Her multimedia collage of ring shouts from Georgia to Gambia animated the interior walls and Lotson’s Ring Shouters performed. … ” Read More

Links:
Charmaine Minniefield
@blackangelatl
#PraiseHouseProject

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