Hana Ward

Imaginal Practice for New Horizons workin on the share system, 2024

Hana Ward’s Imaginal Practice for New Horizons / workin' on the share system (2024) is a painting of three women walking in a new land. According to Ward, the three figures embody “cowpea consciousness” and are based on a photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt taken while on assignment at Howard University in 1946.* “I call this painting Imaginal Practice because I see these women using the creative powers of imagination and visualization to bring something into being,” explains Ward, and “workin’ on the share system" is what they used to call sharecropping, but here I reappropriate the phrase to mean a shared vision, shared labor, and collaboration.” “As I was working on this painting and reading about the time period after Emancipation, I came across the book To 'Joy My Freedom (1998) by Tera W. Hunter, which discusses Southern Black women's lives and labor after the Civil War. I was excited to learn that Atlanta was a significant location for newly emancipated Black women to practice both their newfound freedom (moving to a new place to practice and exercise that freedom) as well as a site for significant collective action. The book documents the many ways Black women came together to organize protests to fight for better working conditions (the Atlanta washerwomen strike of 1881), develop extensive mutual aid programs to fill the gaps Jim Crow created (The Working Women's Society, The Neighborhood Union, Gate City Free Kindergarten), as well as practice joy through a rich dance culture in the city.” While painting, Ward imagined the “feeling of a fresh start that some of these women might have felt when they first came to Atlanta, and how they embodied new ways of being for themselves and amongst their communities.” *Eisenstaedt, Alfred. “Howard University: It Is America’s Center of Negro Learning,” LIFE Magazine, Nov. 18 1946 (photo essay)

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