Communion is a public art and storytelling project that explores the cultural, historical, and spiritual connections between Mississippi and the African diaspora through food. This visual arts experience centers Black foodways as a medium for visual storytelling, intergenerational memory, and collective nourishment.

Nana Kumi is the founder of Gholden Alchemy, a creative studio devoted to storytelling, ritual, plant medicine, and land-based praxis as tools for healing and liberation. Through Gholden Alchemy, Nana cultivates immersive spaces for Black memory work, sacred dreaming, and reimagining freedom.

She proudly uplifts Mississippi as the fertile lands that shaped her along with her ancestry from Ghana, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso, Brazil, and Angola — lineages that inform both her creative and spiritual path.

A devoted student and practitioner of community and spiritual herbalism, Nana has studied under Dr. Jaqui Wilkins NP of Xalish Medicines, Adriana Ayales of Anima Mundi, and is a Level II graduate of Empress Karen Rose’s Spiritual Herbalism Apprenticeship.

She is also the project director of The Spirit in Our Roots, an art-based land initiative addressing food sovereignty and racial justice in rural Mississippi and Louisiana. Through storytelling, portraiture, poetry, and ancestral recipe-making, the project documents the lived experiences of black growers, land stewards, and agrarians — amplifying their wisdom and generational resilience.