Homeplace Project

Reimagining the future of our community by reconnecting to our past.

The Vision

The function of our homeplace is to feed our community through our garden, storytelling, access to skill building workshops and dining experiences. This includes our community within proximity to our homeplace, and the extended community we’ve built through the nature of our work as storytellers and artists. This property holds the home that housed 3 generations of my family, placed on land adjacent to where my elders and ancestors picked cotton and primed tobacco. We have been reimagining our relationship to agriculture and these lands by growing food and keeping seed. The set up is a large garden in the front and side of the property, an outdoor kitchen located in the garden under the massive pines, and my grandfather’s mechanic shop behind the house.

The Shop | This is intergenerational dream space! A place where radical rural imagination runs free and we can make just about anything we can imagine. This creative studio space is where my grandfather Mayfield builds, creates, teaches and collaborates. Since my return home from New York after almost a decade away we have held workshops, screenings, and other community centric events in the space. The shop has great bones and the energy of generations of creativity. The goal is to raise funds and find partners to help renovate this space and make it the brick and mortar for my Supper Club and Juke Joint.

Tall Grass Food Box Pickup Location | Currently the shop serves as the Apex Food pick up location for Tall Grass Food Box, a Black Farmer CSA Co-founded by myself, Derrick Beasley, and Gerald C. Harris. This shop has a long vibrant history in our community as a business that cared for and enriched those surrounding it. Holding our pickup there has been symbolic of the continued love and care we hope to share from this space and a wonderful way to continue to connect people from my neighborhood to the fresh produce we are sourcing from Black Farmers. Expanding our reach to the Apex/ Holly Springs area has allowed us to connect to people outside of the triangle and reconnect them to a community supported system that feeds and creates educational resources. Read more here.

Community Screenings | Under the same roof that my grandfather visioned, built, and shared his voice through his art, my first Documentary film was screened for our community. This screening in 2019 connected us to our community in a meaningful way, both longstanding members and newer families joined us and we defied both language and social barriers that kept us from connecting previously. We also realized how impactful it was for the kids who joined, activating a sense of possibility and excitement that could could be applied to their own experience.

The Garden | The garden has multiple functions, the high tunnels are where heirloom seed and plant production is focused, these seeds are gifted, sold, and banked. It’s used as a food source for the pop up restaurant concept. The food grown is also offered to the surrounding community on a pay what you can basis. We center seeds and food practices from the African Diaspora, and with the help of others we hope to make space and honor other cultures and ways of being.

The Outdoor Kitchen | Tucked away in a cove of trees and wild blackberry, is our outdoor kitchen with a red clay cob oven and stove. This clay was sourced from the lands surrounding the home place that were once occupied by my kin including the acres of pine and oak trees that shaded and cooled this area while housing many other ecosystems. I also sourced clay from the bank our community once used to collect medicine and food. This tradition is being remembered in my work, which you can learn more about HERE.

Questions about how you can engage and support? Email us at RevivalSuppers@gmail.com