“The community I grew up in was mostly Black. The houses that were there had been there for a really long time. Even if I didn’t know the elders personally, they knew who I was because they knew my mom and my grandparents. Now, driving around some of the settlement communities, you can tell they’re being gentrified. Dynamics have changed. There are huge apartment buildings and parking garages that obstruct the views,” Bennett said. 

“Land that used to be publicly available where sweetgrass grows, basket makers can no longer access because it’s now private property and there are trespass notices, or there’s a house there.”

Dufault, the former Clemson researcher who devoted years in efforts to repopulate sweetgrass, has encouraged home and landowners to grow it wherever they can. Sanders, the sweetgrass and clay artist, is trying her hand at it. She will plant grasses behind her studio, not far from the towering oak tree where she takes shade with her grandchildren, dictating Gullah language lessons in McClellanville, further north of Mt. Pleasant; an area where the weavers who have not abandoned their stands have migrated toward in an attempt to beat the traffic. She will also cultivate sweetgrass on a patch of her husband’s family land.

Small, experimental, yet historically rooted farming like this, is how many artists are attempting to explore and preserve African American heritage. 

Textile artist LaChaun Moore is a Maryland native and Parsons School of Design graduate who moved from Harlem to the small, unincorporated community of Pineland, a little over 80 miles west of Charleston, to begin farming indigo and naturally colored cotton in 2018. She explores the connections between the natural dyes and fiber making methods she learned about in the classroom, and how they relate to Indigenous and African American cultures in the South. 

At Parsons, Moore studied integrated design. She described it as a program where students could build the focus they wanted their work to have.