In a little corner of Southwest Detroit sits the African Bead Museum, a site brimming with stories of history, art and culture. The museum, home of thousands of beads from Africa, includes art installations, masks, textiles and sculptures. 

And now, thanks to the museum’s collaboration with the University of Michigan School of Information and the Stamps School of Art and Design, the museum features an “African Futurist Greenhouse” powered by solar energy and overflowing with plants native to Africa. Bamboo, Job’s tears, indigo and variations of mint thrive alongside one another as visitors get a chance to learn about the plants and use them for crafts. 

The project began in 2019 when UMSI professor Ron Eglash was chatting with bead museum director Olayami Dabls about the common use of seeds as beads in Africa. Eglash had just completed a workshop in Ghana where undergraduates were simulating Indigenous designs. 

“Between Dabls’ ideas about seeds and these AfroFuturist designs from Ghana, the greenhouse was born,” Eglash says.

Funding was the first challenge.

“We received a small grant from U-M’s Poverty Solutions, and Stamps School added some funding as well,” says Eglash. “But we wanted to make it solar powered, with sensors for self-regulating water and temperature control: something that could be a model for urban self-sufficiency of the future.” 

Fortunately this was a good fit to a larger scale grant from the National Science Foundation that Eglash received at just the right moment.

“Detroit includes all sorts of artisanal small businesses, from fashion to furniture to farming,” Eglash says. “Those are all opportunities to explore how technologies like artificial intelligence, 3D printing and cloud services might be developed so that they empower these artisans, rather than replacing them. So Dabls and his African Futurist Greenhouse became one of many community participants we were able to fund under this NSF grant for ‘Artisanal Futures.’”

This approach meant that technology could be a bridge to community involvement rather than a barrier. For example, 3D printed models were used to help guide the greenhouse construction crew, which included local workers collaborating with UM students. Together with professor Audrey Bennett from Stamps, they ran a weekend high school program to get local youth involved in digital technologies.

One of the NSF-funded artisans ran her own gardening business, so the soil for the greenhouse was purchased from her store. And once the plants were grown, some of the textile artisans came by to harvest indigo for dyeing textiles. Other African heritage plants in the greenhouse include Job’s tears, whose seeds are traditional in South African necklaces; bamboo for furniture and sweetgrass for baskets.

NSF community participants harvesting indigo for their textile dyes from the African Futurist Greenhouse

“The farming connection has really taken off too,” Eglash notes. “One of our participants, theJOYproject farm, asked us to help fund a combination of solar and rainwater harvesting. We began to see that this was a common need for many of Detroit’s urban farmers, and won an additional grant from the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan to do more of these installations with Family First Solar, a Black-owned worker collective.”  

Through these technologies, urban farms and community gardens in Detroit are able to better provide fresh food to communities, reduce stormwater runoff and provide community spaces for residents to come together. At the African Bead Museum, workshops on using plants to create textiles are regularly hosted, and the space is further able to connect Detroit to the world. 

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Learn more about Ron Eglash’s research and projects by visiting his UMSI faculty profile.