Stories from the Soil: Collage, Culture, and the Black Rural Imagination

Nancey B. Price
Co-Sponsored by the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, the Affirming Multivocal Humanities Mellon Grant, and the Jane Cotton Ebbs Endowed Professorship in Philosophy

Watch a recording of Price’s lecture on our YouTube channel.

Nancey B. Price—Black collage artist, storyteller, and rural Georgia native—explores how Black Southern life, especially in rural communities, is a foundation for future-thinking. Her lecture blends personal narrative, visual art, and literary storytelling to examine the ways in which tending land, preserving culture, and imagining new worlds are inherently Afrofuturist acts. Drawing connections between her creative practice, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, and the film, Sinners, Price makes the case for centering the Black rural South in pop culture’s vision of what’s to come.

Nancey B. Price is a Southern-born collage artist, storyteller, and cultural worker whose work uplifts the everyday lives and imaginative futures of Black rural communities. Raised in Girard, Georgia, her analog collage practice and fiction are rooted in Southern Black traditions, magical realism, and a deep connection to land and ancestry. Her artwork has been featured in Southern Cultures, Garden & Gun Magazine, Oprah Magazine, and Black Collagists: The Book, and exhibited at institutions across the country including the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the Jepson Center, the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, the Averitt Center for the Arts, and the Savannah Cultural Arts Center. In 2024, she created the cover art for The Unboxing of a Black Girl by Angela Shanté, a powerful work longlisted for a National Book Award. Her short story “The Grounding” was published in the Black History issue of Motif Magazine.

Price is also the creator and host of Dreaming in Color with Nancey B. Price, a storytelling podcast dedicated to uplifting the tradition of dreamtelling in the Black community and examining the influence of dreams on our waking lives. Now entering its fourth season, the podcast features intimate conversations, folklore, and reflections that bridge memory, imagination, and spirituality. It has cultivated a dedicated intergenerational audience, with a listenership that is primarily Black women and LGBTQ+ individuals across the country and larger diaspora. Beyond her creative work, Price leads community collage workshops for a wide range of participants—including art educators, university professors, and K-12 students—guiding them to explore identity, memory, and imagination through visual storytelling.