Kija Lucas: In Search of Home

2nd Floor Gallery

In Search of Home is created from plant clippings, rocks, and dirt collected—and then scanned—while tracing my ancestors’ paths from the moment they entered the United States to the present. Driving across the country with stops along the East Coast, South and Midwest, I visited 11 sites where my ancestors were brought, migrated through, or settled. Though these places have, for the most part, been redeveloped many times over, the construction, renovation or cultivation has been wrought on land that my ancestors walked, lived, and worked on. While deeply personal, this series also draws on the work of Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist. Linnaean taxonomy, outlined in Systema Naturae (1735), is a classification system used to identify and order living things.

Though Linnaeus began with plants and animals, his classification of humans into four races fed ideas of racial inequality and difference that we are still recovering from today. My family tree is Eastern-European Jewish, African American, and English, with each branch entering the United States through vastly different circumstances and experiencing racial inequality from a different perspective. In this project, I have treated the plants—whether cultivated plants or weeds, native, nonnative, and even invasive species—in the same fashion, asking the viewer to consider how we choose what is natural, beautiful, and useful.