Dress

This design embodies the importance of ancestral communication. The top is inspired by the embroidery tradition in East Africa. The skirt is made of Kente cloth from Ghana, West Africa. The patches on the skirt represent three elements that compose the drum. The tree (which serves as the base of the drum), the goat skin (which represents the surface that you tap on), and the fruit the woman carries over her head (which represents the extracted dye used to get color to decorate the drum). The surrounding frame on the patch represents my ancestors flowing through the sound waves and rhythms being played on the drum. The young man blows into the calabash horn and ancestral spirits emerge holding a calabash gourd into which the Sankofa bird looks. In the Akan culture (from Ghana), Sankofa is a symbol of the importance of learning from the past and means “to recapture one’s history.”