The blessed nature of the artist commands respect and reverence from everyone. The art that results from such a blessed hand is in turn approached with fear, reverence, and respect because it is accepted as a shipment straight from the Other World. The artist through whom the delivery is made is regarded with awe and approached as the carrier of a gateway. It is as if he or she is a doorway to the other side. More often than not, the artist is not observed while at work. When busy, he or she is occupied by Spirit No one should disturb a person who is consulting with Spirit, or he may attract the Spirit’s wrath.”
-Ancestor Malidoma Patrice Somé: The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community
Nana Kumi is a queer black southern artist, emerging filmmaker, spiritual herbalist, and land steward from Natchez, Mississippi. Her visual work translates the language of plants, visions, and dreams into naturalist and afro-surrealist landscapes as activation sites for re-remembering. Nana completes her work through several mediums: analog photography, film, collective narrative, and installation, weaving together Black American Southern traditions and West African spiritual lineages to create containers for rest, co-dreaming, and radical imagination.
Her current project, Asase Ye Duru: SOIL, has been featured in The National Black Food and Justice Alliance’s Black Sanctuary Exhibit in the Smith-Robertson Museum (Jackson, MS) and published in The Land Food and Freedom Journal.
In 2020, she departed from her career as a beauty and fashion makeup artist in New York City and began focusing her artistic practice on reclaiming Indigenous African Spirituality. Soon after, she created Gholden Alchemy, an arts-healing studio devoted to art, ritual, plant medicine, and land-based practices as Ancestral technology. Through Gholden Alchemy, Nana utilizes various mediums to depict an expansive practice of black healing and artistic traditions.
She proudly uplifts Mississippi as the fertile lands that shaped her, along with her ancestry from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Brazil, and Angola — lineages that inform both her creative and spiritual work.
She is the project director of The Spirit in Our Roots, or Spirit for short, an art-based land initiative addressing food sovereignty and racial justice in rural Mississippi and Louisiana. Through storytelling, portraiture, poetry, and ancestral recipe-making, the project documents the lived experiences of black growers, land stewards, and agrarians — amplifying their wisdom and generational resilience.
NanaKumi.ART is a living archive and digital alter containing the rich and layered work that I hold along with the Ancestors, the land, and community.