The walking Nkisi: African-American material culture in Iowa. A case study on yard art in Waterloo, Iowa

This dissertation examines yard-art among African-Americans in Waterloo, Iowa. It argues that these African-American migrants from the southern states of the United States have tried to preserve their Southern heritage, memory and identity through their yard-art collections. In a description and analysis of the yard-art collections, the dissertation interrogates features of the exhibitions, which give evidence of what Robert F. Thompson and Grey Gundaker refer to as African retentions in African American yard-art. After years of study, these scholars maintain that African Americans utilizing many of the same or similar spiritual signs and symbols as are traditionally used in Kongo culture in central Africa. The views of Thompson and Gundaker coincide with the analysis of the yard-art in Waterloo. The African retentions are ubiquitous; but accounting for this occurrence in the Iowa yard-art does not tell the whole story of the art itself or of the artists' endeavor to capture their own personal narrative or autobiography. Hence, the dissertation pursues another dimension through grounded theory: memory and identity emerged, from the research, interviews of the artists, and critical study of the exhibition of the artifacts, as the two dominant categories, which give unity and purpose to the yard-art exhibitions in Iowa.;While the dissertation describes and analyzes the yard-art of three collections in Waterloo, Iowa, and two collections in Oxford, Mississippi, the analytical focus is on one of these collections as a case study of the role of memory and identity in the structuring of motifs, scenes and personal narrative of Ruthie O'Neal. O'Neal, a native of Taylor, Mississippi, is from a family of yard artists. In Oxford, Mississippi, two of her aunts, Pearline Jones and Louise Booker, continue the art form, utilizing some of the same African motifs as O'Neal. Of all the artists, whose collections were subjected to study, O'Neal's collection provides the most comprehensive utilization of memory and identity to select and organize an exhibition of yard-art to represent her spiritual journey from childhood in Mississippi to the present in Waterloo, Iowa.