Kristin Mimms Scavnicky's Siting Ritual: Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time
- Wed, Jun 10, 2026 - Sat, Jul 18, 2026
Location
Akron Soul Train
191 S Main St
Details
Siting Ritual: Holding Renewal, Inscribing Resilience explores how everyday acts—washing, eating, and gathering—carry the weight of memory, identity, and cultural continuity. Through sculptural soaps and etched tablescapes, Kristen Mimms Scavnicky creates a series of “soft architectures” that exist between the intimate and the communal, inviting both personal reflection and collective experience.
Grounded in research on spatial justice and cultural resilience, the work draws from bell hooks’ concept of the Black homeplace as a site of care and resistance, while also acknowledging histories of exclusion that have shaped shared spaces. By translating ritual into tactile form, Scavnicky elevates ordinary gestures into sites of renewal and affirmation.
The installation asks viewers to consider how acts of care—often overlooked—function as powerful expressions of belonging, memory, and survival across generations.
“In Akron in 1851, Sojourner Truth delivered the speech ‘Ain’t I a Woman?' at the Women’s Rights Convention. She challenged systems of exclusion and affirmed dignity across race and gender. Her presence in Akron reminds us that spaces of gathering—whether a convention hall, a church, or a kitchen table—can be charged sites of both activism and belonging. My project draws from this lineage by transforming everyday rituals like washing and dining into acts of resilience and resistance, echoing how Truth’s words turned ordinary space into revolutionary affirmation.”
– Kristen Mimms Scavnicky
