This article is part of a series focusing on underrepresented craft histories, researched and written by the 2025 Craft Archive Fellows, and organized in collaboration with the Center for Craft.
As one of humanity’s oldest crafts, natural pigment-making occupies the intersection of science, agriculture, and art. It requires curiosity and ingenuity to see a marigold flower, for instance, and know that it can stain fabrics with beautiful shades of mustard yellow to gold; to know, as our ancestors did, that they also have anti-microbial and anti-inflammatory properties. The blue color of denim traces its roots to indigo, a dye crop cultivated and processed by West Africans and their descendants throughout the Atlantic world. The global indigo trade that made blue textiles possible was deeply intertwined with enslaved labor and African dyeing knowledge.
Indigo is just one of many plant and mineral dyes that Africans and Black Americans have cultivated and used to create an array of colors. Bògòlanfini, also known as mudcloth, is one such earth-based color tradition dating back to the Bambara people during the 12th century in present-day Mali. The word itself describes the process: “Bògò” means “clay” or “mud,” “lan” means “by way of,” and “fini” means cloth in Bambara — “mud by way of cloth.”
Despite its foundational role in art and everyday life, natural pigment-making remains largely absent from institutional craft archives. As a researcher and environmental designer, I am deeply invested in Black people’s relationships to plant dyes, sustainable materials, and natural fibers. Yet, in searching for these histories, it seems that the archives fail to fully document the depth and breadth of this knowledge. What I found instead reminds us that pigment-making is an environmental craft tradition worthy of preservation, study, and contemporary revival.
Chemical-derived dyes were discovered accidentally in 1856, though plant-based dyes continued to be used well into the 20th century. Before then, the colors of textiles, art, and painted surfaces relied on natural dyes and pigments from local ecologies. Why do we celebrate finished works while overlooking the craft traditions — and people — that produced their color?
Despite the histories of plant dyes and pigments, I have not found any archives devoted specifically to natural color-making by Black folks in the United States. What I did find was that a celebrated historical figure’s pigment-making was one of his many great achievements, yet is often overshadowed by his other scientific contributions.
George Washington Carver is widely remembered as an innovative agricultural scientist whose research transformed Southern farming through crop rotation, soil restoration, and resource conservation. Born into slavery in Missouri in the early 1860s, Carver was motivated by a desire to support poor Black farmers still living with the economic devastation of slavery and sharecropping. He believed that scientific knowledge and creative practice should be accessible to everyone.
While Carver’s scientific accomplishments are well documented, his artistic and material practices have received far less attention. He was an accomplished artist, craftsperson, and natural pigment maker who understood resourcefulness as both necessity and a way of life. He believed people could make use of the materials available around them. As he notably advised, “From what you have, make what you want.” One of the few moments when Carver’s artistic work received widespread recognition came in a November 1941 Time magazine profile that described him as the “Black Leonardo.” The article coincided with the opening of the George Washington Carver Museum and Archives at Tuskegee University and noted that the institution housed 71 of Carver’s original paintings, many created with paints he and his assistant made from peanut oil, Alabama clay, and vegetables.
