“Spinning a yarn” is a phrase traditionally associated with women’s storytelling, a practice rooted in intimacy, labor, and transmission. It speaks to stories told in pieces, shaped by memory, repetition, and imagination rather than linear record. This framing is particularly apt for the work of Lynn Marshall Linnemeier and Ayanna Ross, whose practices draw from folklore, mythology and family archive to explore how meaning is preserved, altered, and reanimated across time.

Across both artists’ work, storytelling operates as both subject and method. Memory is not treated as static inheritance but as living material. Stories are handled, layered, revised, and returned to. Folklore and personal history blur into one another, producing narratives that feel at once intimate and expansive. What emerges is not a singular account, but a constellation of experiences shaped by care, imagination, and persistence.

As the Flowers honoree, Lynn Marshall Linnemeier anchors the exhibition through an interdisciplinary practice spanning more than four decades. Her work moves fluidly across materials and processes, figuration and abstraction. Linnemeier approaches memory as something built over time through repetition and attention. The longevity of her practice is evident in the density of her work. Stories accumulate, shift, and deepen, revealing how endurance itself becomes a form of knowledge.

As the Seeds honoree, Ayanna Ross extends this lineage through figurative oil painting, working within a historically weighty medium while pushing against its conventions. Her paintings build complex narratives grounded in nostalgia, Black Americana, and familial memory. Familiar interiors, gestures, and atmospheres invite recognition, yet that familiarity is carefully constructed and quietly unsettled. Ross uses oil painting as a site of inquiry, expanding its capacity to hold contemporary Black life with nuance, emotional depth, and narrative complexity.

Together, Linnemeier and Ross articulate storytelling as a generational and recursive practice. Their work affirms that stories are not passed down intact but reshaped through lived experience. To spin a yarn is to labor over memory, to invent where gaps exist, and to insist that what is remembered, retold, and transformed remains vital. In this exhibition, storytelling becomes an act of preservation and possibility, a means of carrying the past forward while allowing it to change. Flowers x Seeds is ADAMA’s Signature program highlighting legacy artists while celebrating the next generation of African diasporic influence.