“I didn’t have to earn love. I didn’t have to prove that I was good enough. I just was. I was always good enough. My mother taught me that there’s always enough love to go around. You never run out of love.”

In this episode I am in the garden with Kesha Bruce. She shares how the way her mother and grandmother raised her made her courageous and confident in who she was and is.

Kesha was born and raised in Iowa by a compassionate community of hippies and revolutionaries.

She fell in love with drawing during a high-school art class and eventually decided to seek her fortune in the artworld.

A week after graduating with a BFA in painting from The University of Iowa, Kesha sold everything she owned and bought a one-way ticket to New York City. 

She landed in Brooklyn with a back-pack full of wrinkled clothes, 2 pairs of shoes, and $3000 in cash in her pocket from selling her car.

Not only did she survive, she managed to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree from one of the most prestigious painting programs in the country and build a life for herself as a working artist.

In short, she’s been exhibiting her work and producing projects and exhibitions in the US and France for almost 20 years.

You can find her artwork in the permanent collections of The Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture (aka The Blacksonian), the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, the U.S. Department of State Art in Embassies Program, and if you pay attention, you’ll spot a few of her paintings on the set of a Netflix movie or a Shonda Rhimes’ TV show.

In addition to her studio work, she’s one of the founders of Black Girl Basel- Miami Art Week’s premier gathering of Black-women artists, entrepreneurs, activists, cultural change-makers, and industry leaders from across the world.

She also currently serves on the Board of Directors of Tessera Art Collective, a non-profit organization supporting the work and creative practices of womxn abstract artists of color.

Our Mothers’ Gardens is a Honeybunch of Stinkweed Production and features music produced by Ptah. Our Mothers’ Gardens is made possible in part by the generous donations of patrons.