I was invited as a guest speaker in October 2023 by visual artist Alfonso Perez Acosta during his residency at Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens.

Alfonso’s work explored painted murals, installation, and workshops rooted in community healing, mandala symbolism, and artistic configurations of collective peace and joy. My contribution to this space manifested through setting up and sharing my altar ritual in story, practice, and embodied reflection — an offering drawn from my ongoing exploration of Altar Alchemy as a sacred design practice.

I shared how a sabbatical I took in 2022-23 became my initiation into Altar Alchemy: a syncretic, artistic healing modality stitched together from ancestral memory, African and Black feminist epistemologies, and the loving wisdom of women and gender-expansive kin across my lineage and community. I spoke of altars as portals and re-membering archives — central communication centers where messages are sent, received, and metabolized. Through altar alchemy, I consider what remains hidden in shadow, what rises through light and reflection, and what shifts, reconfigures, or becomes entirely new.

Within the workshop space, altar alchemy was offered as both framework and invitation. An anchor where African and Black feminist knowledge systems converge with design. I spoke to altar alchemy as an infinitely adaptable resource, one that can be activated, revised, and amplified depending on need, capacity, and context. Not a fixed ritual, but a living practice shaped by curiosity, care, and relational knowing.

At its core, altar alchemy opens a breathable, multidimensional space for connection — between self, ancestors, community, and imagination. It foregrounds accessibility, slowness, and play, inviting people to move at their own pace while experimenting, resting, reflecting, and creating. Sharing this work within a botanical garden — among living sentient systems, healing art patterns, and cycles of nature — underscored altar alchemy as an unfolding sacred design practice, one that continues to expand what African and Black feminist ways of knowing can offer the worlds.