Ancestry is more than lineage. It is a living form of knowledge.

It moves through gestures we were never formally taught, through symbols carried across oceans, through prayers spoken in languages that still feel familiar even when fluency has faded. It lives in objects passed down or carefully remade, in textiles, photographs, altars, and heirlooms. It surfaces in dreams and in intuition, in the quiet sense that something older is guiding the present. Ancestry is not behind us. It is something we carry, consciously and unconsciously, every day.

Sacred Roots explores how inherited spiritual systems continue to shape contemporary identity. Across BIPOC and MENA communities, spirituality has endured colonization, displacement, migration, and erasure. It has survived not as ornament or aesthetic, but as structure. As protection. As cosmology. As a way of understanding time, community, responsibility, and self.

The artists in this issue approach ancestry as active and evolving. Sacred icons, ritual practices, and ancestral presence are not treated as relics of the past, but as living frameworks that inform present realities. Through portraiture, photography, textile, and layered material experimentation, they trace how memory travels across generations. They ask what it means to inherit a spiritual lineage. What is preserved. What is reinterpreted. What is reawakened.

Ritual appears here as both communal and intimate. Shared ceremonies bind communities across time, while private acts of devotion anchor individual identity. Memory is carried not only in archives, but in the body. In gesture. In repetition. In creative instinct. Dreams and intuition surface as legitimate forms of transmission, reminding us that knowledge does not only move through formal institutions.

Sacred Roots does not romanticize spirituality, nor does it flatten it into metaphor. It honors it as a knowledge system that continues to guide cultural expression and political imagination. The artists featured in this issue, Delita Martin, Mayowa Nwadike, Tsoku Maela, Carla Jay Harris, Kipkemoi Henke, Nydia Blas, Helen Evans Ramsaran, and Adama Delphine Fawundu, work within continuity rather than nostalgia. Their practices reflect reverence and questioning, inheritance and reinterpretation.

This issue invites us to reconsider what it means to remember. Not as static history, but as living force. Not as something distant, but as something embodied and ongoing. Ancestry is not a closed chapter. It is an unfolding presence, shaping who we are and who we are becoming.