The Nimble Hands Collective
The Nimble Hands Collective
The Nimble Hands Collective creates pathways for learning, teaching, healing, and community building through the practice of slow handcraft skills.
Our Story
Researching and archiving my maternal family’s history led me to a powerful story that existed alongside loss and removal. This story was one of creation in the face of profound oppression.
Generations of craftspeople were stolen from West African shores precisely for their expertise. Basket weavers, fishing net makers, blacksmiths, and wood carvers honed and shared their skills in community—before and after captivity.
They held fast to their ancestral wisdom of creation with nimble hands and with hearts dreamt of freedom for generations they would never know.
My second great-grandfather Isaac Baisden Jr. was one of these craftspeople. He was basket maker who taught himself the craft after he lost his sight. He learned by feel, running his hands over his uncle’s woven rice fanners and baskets to learn the practice for himself.
The Nimble Hands Collective (TNHC) is inspired by this ancestral lineage of skilled handcraft in my maternal line.
Our Why
The Nimble Hands Collective addresses the critical need for belonging and community building among communities of culture.
While we center solidarity between Black and Indigenous communities, our goal is to build broad coalitions through the shared learning of process based art and handcraft skills.
Our Process
The cohorts who participate in the collective will be the foundation for a contemporary hand craft arts training program that will serve as a space of learning and apprenticeship.
Participants can move through the program as teachers or as artisans who can exhibit their work or offer their handcraft labor to the community.
Finished projects will establish a pipeline where cohort’s work can be shown in both public and public/private exhibition spaces. As the collective grows, we will build partnerships with local library systems across the country, to explore regional handcraft traditions using public library archives.
May Workshop
TNHC is hosting our first two-day workshop Stitching Legacy: Waterways, Identity and Connection May 9 and 10, 2026 from 10am-4pm at the yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective. The workshop will focus on teaching the basic skills of hand embroidery and textile art to tell the story of the connection between the yəhaw̓ community and its local waterway Mapes Creek. The workshop is free.
Participants will be taught by multidisciplinary artist Duwenavue Santé Johnson. Johnson is an accomplished hand embroiderer and contemporary artist who believes creating practices that lead to a slow art movement allows for the stewardship of community space and community led teaching opportunities.
The workshop is a mirror ofJohnson’s Riverviews James River Community Bandana Project which uses printed cotton fabric, needle, thread, and embroidery hoops, to help the local community create legacy map bandanas that will be a part of a larger piece of work.
Participants will also have the opportunity to contribute to this project and have their work featured as part of Johnson’s large-scale, process-based art initiative designed to map the vital connection between a community and its waterway.