Visionary Artivism in Pittsburgh: Rashod Brown

Rashod wearing a shirt with the words “Legalize Trans*” written across the front.

Rashod Xavier Brown is an artivist, organizer, dog parent to Rain and Thunder, and dynamic leader in Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ community. “I love making art. And I love helping people. Put those two together and it’s a win-win situation for me,” Rashod told us. His love of making art was apparent as he showed us around his apartment full of projects in various states of creation, and his love for his community and of caring for his people was just as abounding. He stays consistently very busy working with a number of Pittsburgh based organizations including Project Silk, a project of Pittsburgh’s Community Health Services (CHS), TransYOUniting, Garden of Peace, Initiative for Transgender Leadership (ITL) and Action Housing. 

Rashod is always in the midst of many projects, and in the time he spent with us he shared about a few. In collaboration with folks at CHS, Rashod is currently in the process of developing a training and curriculum to teach transgender medical competency in hospitals across the city. In Pittsburgh, and across the country and world, the medical-industrial complex has long been a space that has targeted, pathologized, and abused LGBTQ people, trans people, and Black and Brown trans people in particular. Rashod’s development of this crucial intervention points to his deep commitment to caring for and ensuring the safety of his folks.

“The way I view it is that this needs to happen cause it’s like 2021, right? And you have all these rights, and non-discrimination, right? And still to this day everybody is seeing gender as black and white, when it’s really shades of the rainbow. So it just baffles me… It angers me to my core. And I just want to go in there yelling at them, but I know that’s not going to do anything, so you have to come at it with, not even a point of understanding, but level headedness.”

Rashod emphasizes the profound influence that his transition had on his outlook on the world and on the work he does. “Living my life in my truth, I saw that there’s really a disconnect within the community toward trans people. And it opened up a new world, because I did not see this, of course, because I didn’t come out, right? So, I didn’t see it at all, until I did and I was just like, “wow, something needs to get done about this.” In addition to his leadership work, his transition also shifted his relationship to his creative work. “I remember starting off I went to The Art Institute of Pittsburgh just wanting to become a special effects makeup artist, make all these mechanical masks and stuff like that, and it really shifted when I started transitioning.” From his dreamy and playful work to pieces that explore his identity and politics, Rashod uses his artistic process as a practice of understanding and communicating with and about himself. “Art, for me, it’s the process of healing, of getting my feelings out, of really connecting to myself.” 

“I have art everywhere in my house,” he told us as he showed us the projects covering every corner of his work table, his dining table, and, surprisingly, his art table, too. “From there to over there is just filled with art and I personally love it because I can make art when I want, and obviously where I want in my house.” Working in multiple and mixed mediums from painting and sculpting to his latest work of building and designing fully-furnished miniatures, Rashod’s work investigates varied themes and he prefers his pieces to stay open to interpretation. “I want you to tell me what you see, what you feel, how it makes you feel, and then we can talk about that. [...] If it aligns with what I envisioned then I know I’m doing a good job.”

On top of his creative work, Rashod has deepened his commitment to the Pittsburgh trans community and broader LGBTQ community in multiple arenas. Whether it’s his education and advocacy in healthcare spaces with Project Silk, his work in the realm of cultural and healing work with Garden of Peace, or marching in the streets with TransYOUniting, Rashod continues to show up for his community, even as his feelings about this place, about his home, are so complex and painful.

“First and foremost, I actually have so many negative feelings toward Pittsburgh and this much positive, but that much is what keeps me here. Pittsburgh for me is home, but it’s like a home that your parents kicked you out of when you was younger and they don’t want you back, but since they're your legal guardians they’re gonna take care of you and it’s the only place you got. That’s what I feel when I think about Pittsburgh. Like I have friends here who I love, I have family here who I love, but in order for me to grow more [...] I have to move but Pittsburgh doesn’t want that. Pittsburgh’s like ‘but there’s still so much work you could still do,’ and I’m like ‘ugh.’”  

This feeling and relationship to home may be familiar to many folks in Pittsburgh and across Appalachia, particularly Black folks and queer and trans folks living across the region: holding a deep love for the gifts of this place, fighting for this place and its people, yet continually being told, actively or passively, that this place doesn’t want you. That complexity and heartache that so many feel for our communities is real and difficult and complicated, and that heartache has the potential to bring us together, too. Rashod reflected on the life-affirming experiences he has had building a community and home in the city that celebrates and centers the wisdom and power of Black queer and trans people. 

“I want to talk about my favorite of all time event which is BTR and that stands for Black Trans Revolution. It was a weekend, I think a little bit more than a weekend long healing retreat. You had all of these trans people from all around—so you had Pittsburgh, Ohio, New York, Philly, New Orleans—trans people from all over came to Pittsburgh. TWOCC which is Trans Women of Color Collective and Garden of Peace teamed up and created healing circles. We actually did a lot of healing circles because we found out that being a trans person, you’re always on the defensive, you are always fighting with everyone to be yourself, So, you cannot just move on from that, you have to heal. And that’s what every place, they’re like ‘oh, let’s create something trans and then they can shut up and it’ll be alright cause they have something now.’ No, you have to create spaces for trans people to talk about their pain and trauma, then heal from it. Cause if you don’t have that healing piece in there then what are you even doing? They’re not going anywhere, So we had that healing piece. And, I kid you not, every single person that went to BTR came out, like, 10,000 times better. Not only did we get the chance to heal, we got family.”

“BTR has changed my life. It has changed my other family’s lives that I have talked to. I cannot praise BTR enough. I feel like every year there should be a BTR for the new coming, younger trans people.” Rashod recognizes with deep gratitude the ways that Garden of Peace and the mentorship and support of the founder Michael David Battle has shifted his own trajectory. “Michael has done so much stuff for me. He started me in the process of getting hormones and he helped me get my name changed. Like, when I was homeless for a while he actually housed me and basically taught me everything he knows.”  

Rashod imagines a future rooted in the principles he has inherited from Michael and so many others; a community beyond the oppression of Black, brown, LGBT, and poor people. “The end of that struggle is when my work is done and I can just rest. And that is like the perfect, that’s my heaven right there.” Rashod envisions a home where he is surrounded by loved ones, family and chosen kindred, who are committed to caring for one another deeply and holistically. “Family, crops to live off of, basically sustaining ourselves. [...] That’s home for me. And a whole bunch of African print. And my ancestors. That’s home.

Recalling an image of a tree with peeling bark, Rashod left us with a beautiful, and tragic, and hopeful metaphor. “I view that tree as a trans person because anybody any day can come up to that tree and peel a layer off that tree and the tree can’t do anything about it, right? So, that tree in my mind is a trans person who can’t move and feels hopeless because you have all these outside people, organizations, society, that comes up and just keeps peeling away all these layers until this tree is bare, and then what? So in my mind I’m like, you have this bare tree that has no more layers for society to peel so society is either going to chop it down or leave it alone to die. So, what I am here to do, I am going to take a picture of that tree then make it my mission to feed that tree, to make sure that tree is nurtured, to basically grow that tree into whatever that tree wants to become, right?”

To learn more and support Rashod’s work you can follow him on Facebook at RXB Creations, check out www.gardenofpeaceproject.org/, or support him via CashApp: $KingRah90, Venmo: @King_Rah90, or PayPal: @RashodX.

Cultivating Belonging in Eastern Kentucky: Annie Jane Cotten

Annie Jane Cotten is an artist, storyteller, herbalist, and an organizer at the Letcher County Culture Hub in Eastern Kentucky. They live in a hundred-years old log cabin just outside of Letcher County in rural Knott County, Kentucky. “It’s only the second time in my adult life that I haven’t had only a wood stove as a heat source. Sometimes I’m not sure I like it, actually. The power went out on Christmas Eve, and I was like, what do people do when the power goes out if they don’t have a wood stove to stay warm? I still don’t understand.” Annie Jane spoke about the profound impact this place and its people have had on her. “I'm in a place that has a huge artistic and cultural history—very deep, very rich—and also people like to make a lot of assumptions about this place, calling it Trump Country and hillbillies and rednecks, all the stereotypes you hear in this world. But my experience over a decade has been much more diverse and much more rich. Rich is a good word for that.”

Born and raised in a small town Crystal Springs, Mississippi, Annie Jane lived in central Mississippi until she was 17 and decided to uproot and move to northern Wisconsin. “I had never been further north than Columbus, Mississippi, so that was a thing that I did! Certainly a lot of culture shock and a lot of world opening all at once.” 

“Long, long story short, I ended up in Central Appalachia about a decade ago doing direct action, a lot of direct action work against mountaintop removal, and water quality and community organizing work around coal slurry and other impacts from mining.” Over time her community organizing work evolved into bringing folks together across socioeconomic and political lines for the common goal of economic development and growing a thriving future for the region, ensuring that that future “is rooted in the arts and culture of that place and also that those creative endeavors and those creative pursuits, when they generate notoriety or economic benefits actually stay within the communities that are producing the work.”

Annie Jane draws a direct link between the region’s long legacy of labor and resource extraction and the extraction of its artistic and cultural production. “That history of extraction in Appalachia extends beyond natural resources but also to cultural production and artistic production as well. So a lot of work that is about finding similarities instead of differences and creating opportunities that can highlight and embrace what is possible when we come together across those socioeconomic and political lines.” She comes to the work of community organizing with years of experience and wisdom about bringing folks together across lines of difference, which she generously shared with us. 

“Try to work with the people close to you and around you and in your networks and in your community from a place of humbleness and a place of openness. We talk a lot about how this country is so divided, and certainly current events make that feel even stronger and more pressing, maybe. And yet, I have never found that communities, even when they’re disparate or politically divided or socioeconomically divided, when you create the container and the space for people to come together with humility, with openness, with respect as baseline, regardless of your difference, that is probably one of the best starting places I can think of. That’s that fertile ground for connection, for imagining, for growing together, for building something stronger.

The primary thing is that it comes with a requirement that you are open to experiencing the humanity of other people regardless of your differences with them. I guess that would be the first place I would start. [...] It is not always a delicate process. Sometimes it’s a rowdy process. Sometimes it’s a very, inflamed process I would say. And yet, if you are committed to one another as human beings, I think that’s the best place to start. Oh, to be willing to understand other people deeply.”

Annie Jane has always felt most at home in rural spaces, almost exclusively living in rural communities with the exception of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “There are all these stereotypes of this region, but the reality is that people here are so wise, they’re so resilient, they’re so smart, they’re so in touch with each other and the larger world. It’s always impressive.” Annie Jane recounted the many ways that their rural community has shown up for one another in the midst of the global pandemic. 

“It’s incredible the amount of solidarity and tenacity and creativity out here. You know, we’ve managed to serve millions of meals throughout the counties. We have had to rearrange everything from church services to community meetings. Like every community, we’ve really had to adapt, but the strength of folks around here is the ability to be creative, resourceful, and resilient. [...] Peoples’ inherent ability to adapt and meet challenges head on with a sort of no-nonsense practicality has been in full swing—‘here we go, we’re doing it!’ At the same time, being really creative in creating opportunities that weren’t there before. Finding ways to expand meal sharing programs, finding ways to create art and music even through this whole experience has been so beautiful. It’s been really beautiful to see. Of course, as per always, people around here know what’s up.” 

Annie Jane offered us beautiful stories of the ways that folks practice their commitment to one another in the hills and hollers of Eastern Kentucky, and at the same time she did not shy away from the complexity and challenges of practicing reciprocal community, particularly in primarily white communities. “Commitment to one another does not mean aquesience. It does not mean a lack of standards. It does mean shared common values and agreements and beliefs. It does not mean that people can do whatever they want and still be a part of your community. But those lines are difficult. They’re difficult to draw, they’re difficult to speak. And they’re difficult to navigate and even establish. [...] I think as white folks, working in white communities, we do have that responsibility not to side step white supremacy, not to side step fascism and racism in our country, and to instead engage people around those topics, even when it really sucks and it’s really hard. You often get pretty far when you can talk about things you agree on, like people should have access to certain care, you know?”

“We have to talk to them about that, we have to be willing to engage both the beautiful hopeful—‘we’re going to build economic recovery in our region with art and culture!’—but we also have to say—“and we’re going to talk about racism, because it’s real!”—you know? And it’s not always easy to hold those things but it’s necessary. I don’t think we get out of that. I don’t think we get to avoid that. I think if we avoid that, we are doing a great disservice to our communities.” 

In our conversation with Annie Jane, she revealed, again and again, the ways in which rural Appalachian communities are models for practicing the values of reciprocity and community care; the ways in which rural Appalachian communities are centers not just of extraction, but of artistic and cultural innovation, community organizing, and all the mundane, joyous, tragic, and beautiful stuff of living in commitment to each other.  

“Stories shape you. So, to be a storyteller is to be someone who deeply wants to understand other people and to know them in a real way. And to be known! And to me that’s such a fundamentally human desire. So, honing that skill, creating a space where, you know, stories can emerge as strong as an oak tree in your yard. They are part of you, they are part of this world. They not only tell us what’s been happening before, the history of our world, but they also shape the future, what stories we tell, how we tell them, who we lift. It’s just so fundamental to me. [...] There are just so many ways we tell the story of our hopes and our dreams and the world that we want to live in and who we are in that world. I’m not sure that anything we do isn’t art or a story.”

What is Appalachia?

“A story, a song, a quilt, a heart, a hand, a dream, a forest, and town. Rooted, complex, various. Gorgeous. Brutal. Appalachia is the space between my heart and hands and the place I lay my head.”

Inheriting Appalachian Love: Mekyah Davis

Mekyah and his twin brother Geonoah.

Mekyah Davis was born and raised in Big Stone Gap, Virginia where he currently lives with his twin brother, Geonoah and his dogs. They live on the same land that his family has lived for eight generations, and in the house that has been passed down for five generations. “I’m a product of an Appalachian love story,” Mekyah told us. “My parents met—my dad is from Birmingham, Alabama and my Mom is from my hometown, Big Stone Gap—they met at Berea College their first year and then got pregnant with me and my twin. And so then they had us.” Mekyah is deeply thoughtful about his complex and abundant inheritances—land, community, and a long struggle for freedom. He has a deep love of, and dedication to, this place and the freedom of its people as well as a clear eyed understanding of the violent histories, and current realities, of subjugation and domination that this place also holds.  

“[At] the end of 2017 I was reading “The Souls of Black Folk” by Dr. W.E.B DuBois and he talked about this term, the ‘double consciousness’ that Black Americans often feel.” In the words of DuBois, “it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

“I think about that so often with my upbringing. You know I had my twin, and I had a cousin, and there was a couple other Black folks in my grade in the school system, but it wasn’t like even just a generation before with my mother’s upbringing. She grew up surrounded by Black children and Black folks, they were everywhere. Like, when she wasn’t in school that’s who she hung out with. So that’s something I reflect on my upbringing. I didn’t have that experience. So I guess it’s kind of isolating.”

Mekyah found his way into sports at a young age. A talented athlete, he found friendship and community playing football with aspirations of going on to play at the college level, before realizing a few days into the semester at UVA Wise that it was not his path. Having played since he was eight years old, he recounted the significance and heartbreak of that passion fading though he now reckons with what the militaristic mentality and culture surrounding football must have done to his psyche over the many years he played.

Mekyah and STAY Project Co-Coordinator Lou Murrey.

After his first year at UVA Wise, Mekyah took time off to recenter and imagine new possibilities for his future. After less than a year of rumination, Mekyah had enrolled in sociology courses at the community college and had found his way to the Stay Together Appalachian Youth Project (STAY) through a high school friend and the gracious persistence of STAY leaders to welcome him into their space and community. The STAY Project is a multiracial network of young people, age 14-30, rooted across six states in Central and Southern Appalachia who connect across the region to make their home communities places they can and want to STAY. And Mekyah now serves as one of the network’s Co-Coordinators. 

After living in Johnson City, Tennessee for a year, he moved back to his family home in Big Stone Gap, VA, a move that brought with it all the joy and richness of tradition and legacy as well as its weight and pain. “I appreciate the small town feel,” Mekyah told us, talking about his love for his hometown, as well as his community. “I appreciate the quietness. I appreciate how slow things are at times. I appreciate how people show up for one another, whether it be, and I hate that it’s usually for times of grief, but like, the community shows up for one another.” 

Mekyah and Jules, RP’s Story Coordinator, at the 2017 STAY Summer Institute on the hill at the legendary Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee.

“But also, I think community is complicated,” he reminded us. “Like, specifically we’re talking about Big Stone; like this place that has nurtured me and shaped me to who I am, this, that, and the other, is also filled with, you know, folks who are racist. Whose kids we played with, we played sports with, or whose kids are now racist themselves who just turn out to be just like [their parents]. You know, and it’s like this anywhere, [...] there’s the closed ignorance but also there’s this overt sense of, like, entitlement.”

At the same time, since moving back to Big Stone Gap, Mekyah has been reflecting deeply on what it means to fulfill his familial legacy. “It’s not something I thought about a lot, but as I’ve moved back it’s something that I’ve really valued and cherished. Not only just how special it is to have this tangible piece of property. That’s one thing that has been able to root my family in place, you know? Is having this tangible piece of property that has been passed on. [...] Even if I decide I don’t want to stay here the rest of my life, [...] I’ve just been thinking about, like, what do I owe my family to somewhat keep my roots here in this, like, in this foundation, in this place that has been so much, that has shaped me, for better or worse, into who I am today. You know?”

Along with a familial legacy, Mekyah has inherited a legacy of Black, Southern, and Appalachian freedom struggle. He gestures to the work of STAY as a guide, recalling his first experience at a STAY gathering: “it was truly just transformative for me. It was my first time really being in that, it was my first time engaging in a popular education style, type of learning, and also just my first time really being in that type of liberatory space. So it was really powerful for me.” Mekyah’s vision, and the work of STAY, is deeply rooted in the rich tradition and historical knowledge and context of Southern Freedom Movements. Mekyah speaks about his work as spreading a “gospel of liberation” to young folks across Central and Southern Appalachia—meeting folks where they are at and not leaving them there, giving folks hope, something to look forward to, and resources to act on their belief in the possibility of a better world. 

Young folks gathered from across Central Appalachia and the South at the Southern Movement Assembly 8 in Hazlehurst, Mississippi.

Mekyah moves that belief into action. He works to cultivate a community that centers the leadership of Black, Indigenous, and other youth of color, queer and trans youth, disabled youth, and folks younger than 18. He has embodied this commitment in his stewardship of the Black Appalachian Young and Rising program and organization of its inaugural gathering, in his leadership in STAY, and so much more. He envisions a community grounded in our history as Appalachian and Southern people, learning, at once, from the legacies of violence, white supremacy, and the Confederacy and those of resilience, solidarity, the Mine Wars, and the Southern Black Freedom Movement so as to step into this moment with context, intention, and strategy. And for these reasons he is excited to be building and resisting with the Southern Movement Assembly (SMA), working from their State of the South report that “captures the struggles that communities on the Southern frontlines experience daily and the conditions that shape those struggles [...] with a goal of informing the shifts needed to achieve real and lasting change.” SMA is a multiracial, multi-issue, multigenerational movement alliance of grassroots organizations across the South. A reflection of this interconnected awareness, the STAY Project serves on its governance council. 

Mekyah and Geonoah outside their home in Big Stone Gap.

Mekyah believes deeply in cultural organizing as a tool to move people. “I think people respond well to art, whether it be visual art or whether it be music. So I think culture is so important in the work that we do, and just how we engage people, but how we move people and touch people.” He continued, “we all have different backgrounds, levels of experience and understanding, but we’re all, everybody that lives here, we all do have this shared culture and identity of being Appalachian. And I think about that as a way of moving people and a way of meeting people where they are at. And then from there you can move through the nuances of culture.” Since its inception, STAY has celebrated the power of culture, from developing the #AppalachianLoveStory to empower folks in order to share their complex and nuanced feelings about this place on their own terms to hosting their first Appalachian Love Fest in February of 2019 in Harlan, Kentucky, and virtually this past February, which brought together musicians, poets, visual artists, and activists from across the region for a day of celebration and joy. 

“When I think of my community I think of love and care. Like I feel a deep, like a deep sense of trust. There’s a lot that comes to mind, but I just think of being able to be present, like, being able to be present, and just being able to be, honestly. And just that being okay.” Mekyah reminds us that relationships of care and kinship must be at the roots of movements that seek to challenge systems of domination and oppression. “Continuing to care for one another and build relationships, that’s the crucial thing, that’s the biggest thing, just building genuine relationships with one another.” 

What is Appalachia? 

“It’s broad, it’s complex, it’s beautiful, it’s home. [...] Something that I didn’t realize when I was younger is that it is what you make it, you know? It is what the people that are here make it. I’m thankful for STAY for “helping me to stay,” and realize that, and giving me the wherewithal to stay and fight for this place that I love, these communities that are near and dear to my heart and that have shaped me to who I am. And so, yeah, Appalachia is home.”

You can find out more about STAY’s work, subscribe to their newsletter, or become a member at their website thestayproject.net.