August 5, 2023 - August 3, 2025 | California African American Museum

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds

That's where truth lies, in our myths, in our songs, that's where the seeds are. It's not possible to constantly hone on the crisis. You have to have the love, and you have to have the magic.

- Toni Morrison

She often spoke to falling seeds and said, "Ah hope you fall on soft ground," because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed.

- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the spring of 2023, Brooklyn-based artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh dedicated time to convening with Black women in Los Angeles, posing the question: "Where do you find joy, love, and safety?" The responses and Fazlalizadeh's own musings from those conversations are reflected in the surrealist environment of Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds, the artist's first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Consisting of illustrated portraits of Black women enmeshed in landscape, archival photographs, and fragmented text, Fazlalizadeh's exhibition attends to the possibilities of refuge and forging community.

Over four weeks, Fazlalizadeh met with over twenty women in surroundings of their choosing, sites where they felt at peace and protected. These locations were often personal and intimate, ranging between the outdoors, homes, and Black-owned businesses. How safety is presumed, built, and felt prompted a series of exchanges that acknowledge the precariousness of such a feeling. As one participant stated in her conversations with the artist, "Safety feels like an umbrella under which exists a bunch of little different safeties that I can feel in a given moment but don't connect to make an overarching safety." According to a 2022 Gallup poll, less than half of Black women in the United States (46%) report feeling safe walking alone at night in the area where they live, compared with about three in four Black men (75%) and a majority of US adults overall (73%).

Speaking to Falling Seeds takes its title from Zora Neale Hurston's iconic novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. In the referenced scene, the protagonist, Janie Crawford, observes and converses with the plant life around her amid her own internal reckoning and rebirth. Her gentle phrasing, invoking community in hopes of supporting life, acknowledges Black women's witnessing and capacity to commune with the natural world. As Fazlalizadeh states, Speaking to Falling Seeds "reflects on these Black women's gathering of natural environments around them, as if nature is a blanket that warms, shields, and protects them.”

Tatyana Fazlalizadeh: Speaking to Falling Seeds is curated by Essence Harden, Visual Arts Curator, and Taylor Bythewood-Porter, Assistant Curator.