Why Memory Workers Guild?

The Memory Workers’ Guild (MWG) exists to create a better present and future for the legacies of Black cultural workers that are often buried behind the nature of our care. While members engage in cross-cultural work in solidarity with all oppressed groups, we center Black, queer, and femme perspectives as both clarifying principles and protective boundaries against the anti-Black racial, sexual, cis-hetero, and class violence that appears all too regularly in our lines of work.

Whether in museums, schools, community centers, non-profits, neighborhoods, and otherwise, there’s a bitter irony many of us have experienced that our deep care for cultural preservation has led to a dismissal of our needs by institutional powers and sometimes even ourselves. In the case of the former, MWG serves as a platform to leverage a collective effort against these painful dismissals, a potential to fight together against our shared working grievances. In the case of the latter, MWG serves as a home base for the replenishment of our tools of care, joy, culture, and energy.

Who Are We?

Memory Workers’ Guild is a decentralized collective of friends, peers, and community members dedicated to the preservation, restoration, and production of Black cultural legacies, experiences, and memories. We are artists, archivists, event planners, non-profit staffers, program coordinators, book collectors, DJs, dancers, and more. 

The term "memory work" was stylized by early 20th century psychoanalytical and sociological thought, and the phrase has experienced a modern resurgence among cultural heritage organizations addressing historical erasures, but it is important to recognize that the practice of memory work is no new phenomenon. It is, in fact, a longstanding spiritual tradition and survival tactic utilized by Black and Indigenous communities for centuries to educate, preserve heritage, and resist genocide. Memory lives on in us all, and as we share and learn from one another, the real work begins.