Cowpea consciousness

Ochi is pleased to participate in the third edition of Atlanta Art Week to take place at 680 North Avenue NE in Atlanta, GA from September 30 through October 6, 2024. The gallery will feature a solo presentation of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Hana Ward. The exhibition will be open to the public daily from 10am to 5pm EST and will also be on view by appointment. On Friday, October 4th at 7pm, Ochi will welcome curator Melissa Messina and artist Hana Ward for an in-person exhibition walkthrough and conversation.

Hana Ward’s new body of work, Cowpea consciousness, expands upon the artist’s ongoing explorations of the complexities of identity, introspection, and transformation as informed by Black land justice, spirituality, agricultural and art histories, and the cycles of the natural world. In meditating on the delicious cowpea and its rich history, Ward focuses on the legume as a symbol of abundance, luck, and prosperity—also known as the black-eyed pea, cowpeas have historically been referred to as "the mortgage lifter" and "the poor man’s bank" for their ability to enrich soil and improve the land's yield.

Originally farmed several thousand years ago in Africa, West African cowpeas were brought to the United States via the transatlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans cultivated this crop in subsistence plots, distinct from the commodity fields of the plantations. Often considered “a seed of Black resilience”¹, the cowpea became a food staple in the gardens of enslaved people in the South and, over the last 300 years, they have been reclaimed as symbols of heritage, history, and connection to place. Extremely adaptable to hot and dry conditions, the cowpea plant returns major nitrogen reserves to the soil, making it a great rotational crop. “I like to think that cowpeas—because they grow together in pods—hold the spirit of collaboration that encourages their ability to enrich the soil so powerfully”, elaborates Ward.

“This body of work includes figures who have what I'm calling a cowpea consciousness: they see themselves as abundant, connected to the land, and harness their collaborative power to enrich their lives. As a backdrop to this work, I look to particular moments in history when this kind of consciousness was viewed as threatening and therefore was intentionally undermined, namely, the origins of sharecropping as well as the ‘whitelashing’ against Black wealth and collectivism that occurred in the early 1900s”.

Aligned with two concurrent group exhibitions in Southern California, Against monoculture at the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum in Long Beach and World without end: the George Washington Carver project, an official exhibition within the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, to take place at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, Ward’s participation in Atlanta Art Week aims to engage with the historical contexts of Atlanta and its surrounding communities while echoing a growing national discourse.

Through contemplation and writing Ward collects her thoughts and shapes her subjects, extensively mining literature, nonfiction, and primary historical sources to cultivate her own philosophies that take concrete form though the act of painting. Cowpea Consciousness considers Michael W. Twitty’s article, The cowpea: a recipe for resilience (2019); Ian Ochiltree’s Mastering the sharecroppers: land, labour, and the search for Independence in the US South and South Africa published in the Journal of Southern African Studies (2004); Rooted: the American legacy of land theft and the modern movement for Black land ownership by Brea Baker (2024); South to America: a journey below the Mason-Dixon to understand the soul of a nation by Imani Perry* (2022); In The shadow of slavery: Africa’s botanical legacy in the atlantic world by Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff; and *To joy my freedom: southern black women’s lives and labors after the civil war by Tera W. Hunter (1998).

Hana Ward (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA from Brown University in 2011. Ward’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Museum in Long Beach, CA; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Harun Gallery, Beyond Baroque, and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA; The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, NY; Mrs. in Queens, NY; Roche Projects in Kyoto, Japan; and The Breeder in Athens, Greece. In 2023, Ward attended the Hayama Residency in Japan. She was awarded a 2017 Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Artist-in-Residence Grant. Ward’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Artforum, Frieze, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Amadeus, Artillery Magazine, and AUTRE. Ward currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Ochi.