Every Sunday, Botanical Colors sits down for an interview with a luminary in the natural dye, textile and art world. Grab a cup of tea and settle in to learning about someone you never knew! Catch up on all our Sunday Visits here.
This week’s Sunday Visit we catch up with Kenya Miles, to have a deep and meaningful conversation around what the color blue means. How Blue Light Junction came to be and how through community and craft we can hold space for each other to learn to learn. We had a wonderful phone interview that honestly left me feeling like it’s time for a podcast? This interview was edited from it’s original format and condensed.
Can you tell us a little bit about the origins of Blue Light Junction, how it all began?
It’s a big question. It was many decades of work, but I was living in New York for eight years. I went to college in New York and stayed in New York. I worked in film and television, and had the opportunity to work on a show that was very popular. Queer Eye for The Straight Guy.
Oh my god… we are big fans here at Botanical Colors.
Yeah. We were the original. Yeah, it was number one. It wasn’t number two. Some friends were like, oh my god, a queer eye came out and then… I watched it and I was like it’s better than our show. Well, the art director came in one day and handed me this book from the loft space the Fab Five had, and it was on the coffee table, it just said Oaxaca. She was like, you’re always talking about baskets, now go for it. I looked at it and I was like, yeah, this is where I’m moving. Goodbye. You know? This is where I’m going. It took about a year and a half and I saved up and I moved to Oaxaca. No relationships with people there. I had no knowledge of Spanish. I didn’t know anything.
I was just telling someone this – that I found out many years ago, but I’m a big fan of Ruth Asawa. I used to just sit at the feet of her work in San Francisco. When I first moved to the West coast, I would go there all the time. I didn’t really know much about her work. I knew she was a I would just sit at the feet of these like sculptures and then many years later, I found out that she moved to Mexico and learned her technique through another artist who was doing the same thing, an artisana. And I was like, “Oh my God”, You know, because me moving to Mexico as a young black woman, what are you doing? People didn’t understand it. So. That really was inspiring for me many years later to understand that, that we do what we need to do, right? The thing is calling us, right? Whatever it is calling us. And if you are able to, because I understand that it is also a privilege, right? Like not everyone is able to answer that call, but I did what I felt was necessary for my life. At the time, you know, use the resources that I had. I saved money. The goal was to live there for a year, which I did, and I had the opportunity to work with people who were able to teach me embroidery and I learned a lot. The culture is predominantly Zapotec. I lived in Teotitlan, a rustic village outside Oaxaca city, and for two weeks of every month I would live there.
I think that was really like the beginning of what is now Blue Light Junction. Because I will say this, I didn’t know anything about hospitality or welcoming or being a generous steward or a teacher until I moved to Mexico. I spent time in the villages with these folks and anything that was theirs was mine.
I don’t think that I’m anywhere near that kind of a person, but it is always a metric for me. It’s always a measure for me for how I’m engaging. A lot of people joke at the studio, like, Oh, we’re having an event, you know, and you gotta have food. I don’t care if it’s like an hour. Your throat will not be dry.
That was the beginning really. In that space and time. Then I continued to travel for another year, I went to South Africa and a lot of different places just to spend time with other craft people, practitioners and artisans. I continued on for like 10 years and I ended up coming back to New York, worked on one more movie and I was like, man, I gotta get out of here. So I moved to the Bay – I really moved to LA at first and I was, trying to be as close to Mexico as possible. But I knew time was up. I needed a job. So I moved up to the Bay, and would travel one month a year learning craft. You know, like me alone in a mountain village in Panama. Trying to figure it out. Those pathways lead to Blue Light Junction.
I worked in news for almost 10 years in the Bay, and when I moved back to Baltimore, both for financial reasons and to be close to family, I said, I’m not going to get another news job, I don’t want to be around all of that fear based thinking. I’m just going to go for my art and that was terrifying. I felt like I had to do it. It was really important for me to not have my son remember me as a hobbyist. As someone who really embodied that this was the art that they lived by. I always taught natural dyes in the meantime, and two professors from MICA came in and offered me a residency with grant money funded by the state who was interested in natural dyeing. There was a project that had been in the works called the Baltimore Natural Dye Initiative ran by the first lady of Maryland Yumi Hogan. She was from a lineage of fiber creatives from Naju, Korea. Rosa Chang who is a collaborator of mine, was a friend of hers and an opportunity came up for me to be a resident artist. They were also looking for a farm where they could be growing indigo. Just tell me if the rooster is too loud.
I love that you are near a rooster right now…
So, we started this project in the fall of 2019. Rosa and myself worked as an artists and there was another resident artist who’s an elder named Kibibi Ajanku. The three of us sort of investigated different practices in natural dyes. We wanted to start a garden. Ironically, there was a garden a couple of blocks from where I lived and Micah students had reinvigorated it many years before. So folks already had a relationship to it. So we started this garden. Rosa and I very zealously started 35 to 40 plants. And then we’re like, okay, how are we going to investigate all of these plants? You know? She was really focused on indigo and I was really focused on native plants and indigenous practice through different indigenous communities and in Maryland and Baltimore. And that I found to be a little bit harder to grasp.
At one point we, you know, gardening two to three times a week and someone from the building that was next to the garden said, “ Oh, this space is being renovated. You should look at it”. He was an artist who had a space, but it was an old auto body shop and he was turning it into an Interactive space. And so,I said, Rosa, do we need another space? I was already six months into it and sort of like, what do you do? And that was really the bones of Blue Light Junction. Several months and really a day before I went to celebrate my 40th in London and Morocco, I pitched this idea.
At the time, I’d been reading a lot of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is a native son of Baltimore, and in his fiction novel The Water Dancer, he talks about in the first chapter, as the protagonist is dying, he’s drowning, and as he’s drowning, he sees this blue light, and he talks about how it’s a place of welcome, and that it’s an ancestral place. The studio also happens to be at this junction point, so I was like, Blue Light Junction, you know, that’s kind of it.
What’s the future for Blue Light Junction? What else would you like our readers to know?
Well, I think one, we have a space upstairs, which so we have two floors, which I did in the video, but the second floor is now is for our research residency program which happens every two years and it’s an opportunity for for artists in two cycles to research and reflect on their work and the work that we’ve been doing. They have a studio space and a stipend and access to the workshop. It’s a really beautiful exchange.
And with the concept store, you know, I’m really looking at that as a space of like, as an homage to Miles Davis as kind of blue and then something borrowed something blue.
Bluelight Junction feels like a relationship laboratory, you work together with your artists and the people in your community, as community is such an integral part of your practice, as well as your partnerships. I love that you have named your concept store Some Kind of Blue. Could you tell us a little bit about your relationship to Miles Davis, and what the color blue means to you specifically?
What does blue mean to me? You know, I think that as an artist and a person who found their way to fiber just through an interest in being more grounded and working with my hands and being tactile. I think I really built a relationship through blue was just an exploration of indigo. That is why my son is named Indigo. More related to it being really the first the first dye that I loved, sat with really, and also just the history of diaspora and being black, and our relationship culturally with indigo.
I’ve come to grow into different things that it means to me. And really, it’s a personal thing. It’s really private. I didn’t start doing Indigo practice in the public space until Blue Light Junction. I don’t think that I’m an Indigo Dyer. It’s something that I feel like is a personal thing. I’m just growing in it personally. And that’s beautiful for me. And I think that color has morphed into many things. When my grandfather died. I hiked up to Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. And there was this wild Rosemary growing and I picked it and I had this Indigo dyed cloth handkerchief that I like wrapped and buried with him. I did the same with my grandmother. And this is just something that I did on my own. It felt like that’s what I wanted to have with them.
And then, you know, later through the workshop with Aboubakar Fofana, I learned about how historically, wrapping our dead in blue is something that’s a part of West African culture. And, you know, I think that that really, again, there are things that we know and we don’t know. And as people of diaspora who don’t have a direct lineage to very specific cultures I think that that just is a part of like ancestral understanding.
And so somehow it came to me. And so I think that those things now are really vital to what I’ve come to understand about blue, that it’s really more about this evolution of relationship and culture through these sort of ancestral, low level vibrations. Like, all the things that are up on Earth and in the ground. And so, that’s really what Blue has been for me, and that relationship continues to grow, and I continue to work as a practitioner and teacher. And like, you know, just trying to understand, like, what is it I’m trying to teach?
And really, that is what we’re trying to focus on is what are we culturally holding at Blue Light Junction and that’s kind of the beginning of it for us.
