Carl Harrison Jr. | We Be Keeping
We Be Keeping is a body of work about inheritance, cultivation, and the labor of keeping memory alive. Rooted in my family’s relationship to land in New Orleans’ St. Roch neighborhood, the work considers the garden as both a physical place and a living archive, shaped by generations of Black life, displacement, foodways, craft, and care.
The work begins with a family site. My great-grandmother Eve Profit was a gardener whose generation helped reshape the neighborhood around what was then Independence Square, now St. Roch Park. In the 1990s, my father, Carl Harrison Sr., bought the property where the garden now sits, working to preserve the land before Hurricane Katrina altered both the property and the neighborhood around it. Years later, I returned to this ground through beekeeping and growing food, eventually founding the St. Roch Community Garden.
At the center of We Be Keeping is Portraits of the Carried, a digital collage series pairing plants grown in the garden with masks associated with cultures from their regions of origin. Through collage, plant and mask become a single figure. Okra, mirliton, black-eyed peas, cayenne, mustard, rosemary, thyme, sage, bay leaf, tulsi, Three Sisters, and Trinity become portraits not simply of what we grow, but of what those plants carry with them: histories of Indigenous cultivation, African and diasporic foodways, migration, trade, displacement, and exchange.
The masks draw upon traditions of adornment, protection, ceremony, and transformation while speaking to New Orleans, where masking remains a living language through which ancestry and identity enter the present.
The photographic series In Our Hands brings the work back to the body. Hands hold okra, tend a vanilla orchid, lift a purple sweet potato from the earth, and gather honey from the hive. The photographs make visible the human relationship at the center of cultivation: touching, tending, harvesting, carrying, and passing on.
That labor continues through transformation. Flowers become honey. Peppers become hot sauce. Tobacco becomes cigar. The Hive’s Offering and Eve’s Sweet Heat, named for my great-grandmother, enter the work as material evidence of what cultivation can become. Cailloux’s Reserve, an assemblage honoring André Cailloux, a Black Civil War hero and skilled cigar maker, extends this exploration beyond my own family toward histories of Black craft, enterprise, and skilled labor that can disappear behind the historical figure.
To keep something is not simply to possess it. Keeping requires labor. We keep land, seeds, recipes, photographs, names, skills, and stories. We keep returning.
We Be Keeping treats the garden as both archive and possibility, a place where histories from many origins take root together, and where the past is not preserved unchanged, but cultivated, transformed, and carried forward.
