Darci Kern (@DarciDoesIt) was gracious enough to recently sit down with me for a Zoom interview.

We talked about what was on our needles (her: a sweater of her own design; me: the Lucca Scarf by Julie Hoover), about our quarantine adventures in training our respective puppies, and she even humored me with a live unboxing of yarn that was aptly delivered while we were chatting (small batch skeins from Birch Hollow Fiber and Serendipitous Wool as part of their Yarn Journeys Book Club)!

But the majority of our conversation was about her Knitting While Black photo series on Instagram, which seamlessly weaves history, humor, activism, and art into posts which I personally look forward to every Sunday!

It all started in July with this photograph of noted suffragette Sojourner Truth. 

As we approached the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment — which gave white women the right to vote on August 18, 1920 — the famous portrait hit Darci a little differently than it had before.

She thought to herself, "I don't know that I've ever seen another historical photo or painting of a black person knitting. There's got to be more out there!"

So she started with a search on Google Arts & Culture. Of 1,300 search results, there were exactly 2 photos of Black people knitting. She was disappointed, though not all that surprised.

Darci learned to crochet as a child from her grandmother, who learned from her mother, who learned from her mother, and so on. She learned to knit from her mom about a decade later. "[Those search results are] not my experience of who I know that knits... There was no shortage of Black people working in fine art and knitting. There was just no representation."

And so, Knitting While Black was born.

In addition to the amplification of Black makers that came with the #diversknitty conversation that started on social media about a year ago, Darci wants to create actual art (through the re-creation of existing art) that features Black people, while shedding some light on little known histories in the process.

"Our labor — our place in the fiber industry — is literally in the fiber. In this portrait series, I'm trying to make it plain that Black people have been here, Black people have made [fiber arts] possible (you're welcome!), and just because we weren't depicted in the art back then doesn't mean we weren't doing it!"

The research skills that she honed as a Black History major at Kenyon College have been put to good use with this project, where she digs up primary sources and pieces together the larger historical context of the artworks and the periods from which they come.

Among the many under-told stories she's unearthed so far:

Mary Eliza Mahoney, the first Black nurse to be licensed in the United States:

Robert Smalls, born into slavery and who became a South Carolina Congressman:

And Archibald Motley, the Harlem Renaissance artist who painted the not-so-cleverly named Knitting Girl (and his self-portrait):

Though Knitting While Black was in part born out of an excess of time during quarantine, Darci doesn't see the project stopping any time soon.

She committed to making 12 re-creations as the first-ever grant recipient through the Be Seen Project, a "community for BIPOC artists and makers who are using their work to center marginalized voices and create social justice dialogue and change."

But despite having already met her post quota through the grant (and despite the pieces being quite laborious) Darci says, "I can't see what would come into my life that would make me not want to share history."

Each Sunday, Darci posts two photos to her Instagram stories and lets her followers vote on which piece she'll recreate next. From there, she figures out the technical details of how to recreate the look, giving special thought from everything to the props to the background.

For example, I adore her clever incorporation of a vibrant orange skein of yarn to recreate a braided crown, and the architectural backdrop of the St. Louis Arch in her re-creation of this 1880 oil painting by Polish artist Aleksander Gierymski.

This particular painting was one of many pieces of art that was stolen by the Nazis and went missing for decades. (In fact, it was only recovered 10 years ago, when it mysteriously showed up in an antique market in Northern Germany!)

Once Darci has the raw materials ready to visually re-create the artworks, she spends a full day researching the pieces and the eras; adding to the conversation through her incisive captions, which read like mini essays.

In the piece above, for example, Darci adds a bit of her own family history, paying respects to her grandfather who served abroad with the U.S. Army in a segregated Engineer General Services Regiment during WWII. (It's worth pointing out that he wouldn't even get the right to vote until 20 years after he served his country.)

And she brings it full circle by anchoring the pieces from the past in the present.

In the above, she starts her caption by talking about the literal looting of artwork by the Nazis. She rounds it all out, however, by bringing it back to the divisive buzzword:

Like [this painting], Black American's rights, freedoms, and most tragically — lives — are looted. This painting made it back to its home in 2010. We can’t ever get back the people we have lost, but we can keep fighting for the justice they deserve... In America we have many names for looting. Slavery. Jim Crow. Sharecropping. Mass Incarceration. Police Violence. Voter Suppression. LOOTING by another name.

Follow Darci on Instagram if you aren't already (bonus: her OT husband makes regular appearances to help folks out with their knitterly aches and pains!!)

And if you want more behind-the-scenes content, you can support Darci's work for as little as $3/month on Patreon!