Jewel D. Pearson
In 2015, I designed and built a beautiful tiny house that I thankfully still adore. My house has twice been featured on HGTV, Apartment Therapy, in numerous other mediums, internationally and in a very cool and award-winning short film, The New Homesmiths, that provided a beautiful platform to talk about more than just the usual fluffy tiny house design and decor. For many, seeing me was the first time they’d seen a Black person as part of the tiny house movement.
In addition to me living in my home, this journey has led to me becoming a tiny house advocate, speaker and consultant. However, because many of my experiences within the movement have been very different from my counterparts simply due to race, I founded Tiny House Trailblazers as a platform to bring awareness to those experiences and challenges. Tiny House Trailblazers is this very cool collaboration of uniquely and individually talented Black women, who together are a force for representation within the tiny house movement.
Find your voice and use it.
Dominique Moody
Dominique’s creative journey began early in life as the sixth of nine children, born of African-American parents in 1950's Germany. With such an unusual beginning, her life’s journey was bound to unfold into an odyssey of creative survival. Through these circumstances came her first language in which creativity played a vital role to communicate her thoughts in order to navigate the unjust social boundaries placed on Black people throughout the diaspora. Her creative tools of insightful expression manifested visually into the narratives of her art, portraying her family’s pattern of movement by displacement, although traumatic were mitigated by a nomadic way of life.
For many of us the "American Dream", was deferred by racial disparities of income and the segregated redlining of neighborhoods, so our movement from place to place was out of necessity. To mitigate this discontent, Dominique's reimagining of home became her visual aesthetic as well.
Through her experiences of these common dwellings came her introduction to assemblage, and out of which she honed her ability to restore and recreate home from the debilitated houses that she and her family lived in. Creativity seeded her dreams of the Nomad and her resilience was maintained by the family’s belief that “home was an idea that resided within them, no matter where they were”.
It's been more than forty-six moves later and Dominique’s dream of her nomadic art home is now being realized in the footprint of a tiny mobile dwelling. With a license plate, "NOMAD46", and pulled by a 1950 box truck, this travelers caravan functions as her home and an artist residence on wheels.
Now in 2020, the necessity of our times culturally, economically and environmentally means that we must respond to our basic needs, so I've found my path as I walk in the footprints of my nomadic ancestors, who understood that finding a way to being at "Home in the World" meant that our "Home is the Earth".
[Photo by J Michael Walker]