When I moved to Richmond, Virginia in 2014 I was an 18-year old, closeted queer boy, alone in an unfamiliar Southern city, looking to mature into a working artist and get to know myself along the way. The journey since hasn’t been easy, but in times of uncertainty I have always found Richmond to be watching over me like a silent guardian. From wafts of gardenias or night-blooming tobacco, and historic greenspaces as locales of refuge or rendezvous — to glimpses of phantoms on midnight strolls and downtown streets turned Hollywood sets at golden hour, it is a place that recognizes its deeply rooted history, with a passion to continually blossom anew— much like I have over the past ten years.
As Benjamin Botkin mentions in A Treasury of Southern Folklore, “if at times…the immortals of Southern history seem to lack folklore appeal, that is because the folk stories have died with the people that told them or because the biographers have been more interested in erecting a marble monument than in portraying a flesh-and-blood creature.”
Thus, this ongoing series tells the story of my coming of age alongside a place imbued with an almost indescribable magic where past and present coexist. Referencing the hardiness of its leaves in tandem with the delicacy of its flowers, To Cultivate A Magnolia poetically visualizes the folklore and history of Richmond and greater Virginia, the complexities of queer identity, the endurance of the American Civil War, and reflections that come as we age.