The Family Altar: Relics of the Black Church is an ongoing series following Family Follicles, exploring the church fan as both a functional object and a powerful relic of Black religious life. Once used for cooling in the pews, church fans became cultural archives—often printed with religious imagery, civil rights leaders, and Black-owned funeral home and business advertisements, holding layers of community memory and history.

In this work, I transform archival family photographs and documents into church fans, bringing together personal lineage and collective history. Some images honor ancestors who are no longer with us, while others preserve forgotten or overlooked family moments and records like census documents.

I chose to render these images as cyanotypes, connecting the work to early photographic practices in African American history, where the process was used for inexpensive proofs and educational documentation—an accessible way of recording Black life and culture at the turn of the 20th century.

This series continues my exploration of memory, ancestry, and material culture through the lens of the Black church.