Conjuring Art Interview: Nedra T. Williams: Audio

Conjuring Art audio interview Nedra T. Williams interviewed by Luisah Teish

Listen to a lively discussion with Priestesses of the African Orisa tradition, where they discuss healing “spiritual dereliction” via the artist’s direct connection with nature, perform a ritual invocation of the Goddess Olokun, and recount deep-forest encounters with walking sticks, spiders as big as melons, and a mysterious woman in a purple dress.

Conjure Collage Art and Design is Nedra T. Williams‘ Oakland based company whose connection to water is spiritual, natural and divine. As an artist and designer, she uses her relationship with water as catalysis to the world of symbolic reflection. The dream life, like water, becomes a stage for creation without limits. At home in the serenity and solitude of Nedra’s studio, memories of the face of a woman at the ocean, a young man working at his craft, great monuments, and images of nature join together, divinely guided, in her mind and through her hand to create art. Influenced by the history of her culture, Nedra T. Williams chooses to embrace the aesthetic and spirituality of the African Diaspora. That choice is neither limiting nor exclusive. Her passion for art, exhibits a reclamation and illumination of the ancient symbols, which portray the rituals, and stories of our collective remembrance.

Luisah Teish (also known as Iyanifa Fajembola Fatunmise) is a teacher and an author, most notably of Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal Charms and Practical Rituals. She is an African-American, born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal whose parents had been two-generation servants and only one generation away from slavery. Her mother was a Catholic, of Haitian, French, and Choctaw heritage. Her original ancestry also includes Yoruba (West African). She is an Iyanifa and Oshun chief in the Yoruba Lucumi tradition.

In the late 1960s, Teish was a dancer in Katherine Dunham’s group, where she learned and performed traditional African and Caribbean dances. After leaving the dance company, she became a choreographer in St. Louis. In 1969 she joined the Fahami Temple of Amun-Ra, and it was here that she took the name “Luisah Teish”, which means “adventuresome spirit”.

In the late 1970s she became an initiate and priestess of the Lucumi religion. She began teaching in 1977. She currently resides in Oakland, California.

Teish has said in an interview “My tradition is very celebratory – there’s always music, dance, song, and food in our services – as well as a sense of reverence for the children. It’s joyful as well as meditative.”

One author said she was the “perhaps the most well known.. Yoruba priestess.. of the [San Francisco] Bay Area” (2010).[11] Another author characterized her as “..well known internationally in Goddess circles as a writer and ritual-maker.”

http://www.yeyeteish.com/