She asked her mother… was an installation dedicated to the women ancestors in Leah Rachel’s family, in honor of her mother Doris Gipson, a Florida elementary school library media specialist, and her Aunt Minnie Lee Gipson, a family historian and photographer. The project explored sacred spaces between Black daughters, mothers, and othermothers that create the possibility for questions of freedom while living in the South. The work is a meditation on the spaces and rituals that Black girls invent when no other possibilities for their experiences and voices exist. Referencing a collection of family photos, and the family piano, her work celebrates intergenerational spiritual care practices and the curiosities that Black girls bring to their families and communities. During the installation participants could play the piano, bring offerings, and read books from a collection of banned youth books in the Freedom Joy Library.

The Black Girlhood Altar

She asked her mother… featured a new iteration of The Black Girlhood Altar, a multimedia, artifact-based, video, and object-based artwork that invites community members to give offerings in honor of missing and murdered Black girls and young women. In collaboration with artists Scheherazade Tillet and Robert Narciso from A Long Walk Home, Leah Ra’chel created a new iteration the altar for Round 53 at Project Row Houses. The original altar was installed at site specific locations in Chicago at the Weinberg Newton Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Rainbow Beach. Inspired by Yemaya, the Orisha in the Yoruba tradition who protects children, the traveling altar features everyday and iconic objects of Black girlhood – family photos, flowers, jewelry, cosmetics, toys, and double dutch ropes – as an ode to healing, play and the tragic loss of childhood when Black girls are victims of violence.