About the artwork:
“Preserve celebrates food traditions and aims to help viewers recollect the vibrant past of the East Raleigh-South Park Historical District. My banner design is an ode to the African American home demonstrators. From 1919 to 1965, these dedicated women taught North Carolina’s African American homemakers about nutrition, sanitation and home economy. The woman in the design represents the hard-working African American home demonstrators and homemakers who canned and preserved foods to extend the bounty of their summer gardens and farms.
I designed my submission to bridge the past and the future of Blount Street. I am a supporter of the Raleigh Food Corridor—a community-sourced project along two miles of Blount and Person streets that links communities through local foods. I believe that the home demonstrators’ ethos of making the very best of limited resources is well worth reclaiming and preserving.”
About the artist:
Linda Dallas received a master’s degree in product design from NC State University and a BS in mathematics from Howard University. She has been an instructor at various institutions and organizations since 2006. In 1997, she coordinated the Exploris project team that traveled to Senegal, West Africa to collect artifacts, video footage and photographs for Exploris’s WOW Senegal exhibit.
