SUNDAY DINNER: Ancestral Feast of Gratitude

The Praise House Project is a community-based initiative which places  multimedia, site specific public art installations within communities in order to uphold the African American histories and narratives of the area in an effort to address issues of erasure and systemic inequities. Each Praise House is a small wooden structure with a fully immersive digital projection installation of a Ring Shout, created from archives and/or footage collected from the community in which it resides, with a sound installation emanating from within, inviting gatherings in safe spaces, like praise houses once before. 

Recalling freedom, The Praise House Project invites communities to examine history while encouraging historic and cultural preservation as acts of repair within the context of race, diversity, equity, and inclusion.

 While the Praise House rests at Beacon Hill in Downtown Decatur, it will remember this historic community, referred to as “The Bottom”, established during Reconstruction as a freedmen's town.  Though Beacon Hill became a burgeoning Black residential and business district, populated by newly freed individuals who worked and raised their families in the area, the community was largely destroyed by the FDR Housing Act of 1937, leveling the shotgun houses, displacing generations of families to make room for public housing and city offices. The installation acknowledges the legacy of Black resilience and achievement, the recent establishment of the African American collection at the DeKalb History Center which includes a historic Freedmen's Bureau registry, as well as the recent removal of a nearby Confederate monument, and the history of labor in the area, including that of Agnes Scott College, the artist’s alma mater. 

Host or Publisher The Praise House Project Inc.