Creatives in Conversation: Jovan C. Speller

Rural Minnesota provides a fruitful and thriving landscape for this artist and activist with ties to the Twin Cities.

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Situated on a 3-acre homestead in the middle of Osage, Minnesota (population 258), amid trees that butt against Smoky Hills State Forest, Jovan C. Speller makes her home with her husband and two young children. A decades-long purveyor of permaculture, an activist for Black land rights, and a multidisciplinary fine artist, Speller has also taken on another role, as executive director for The Great Northern Festival. We recently visited with Speller to talk about her purpose-driven life of thriving where she plants herself and cultivating a living with deep roots in activism and wellness.

Having lived in California, Colorado, and cities on the East Coast, what made you choose rural Minnesota as your ultimate home and place to set up a homestead with your family?

I always knew I wanted to have lots of land and be able to cultivate and grow my own things. It’s funny how many people repeated back what I had been telling them over the years—that “all I want is my family, and I want to raise my kids in the woods.” I’ve been living the internal reality of this place in my head like in a dream space for 37 years until I was finally able to execute it.

I knew that I wanted to have access to natural resources. I didn’t want to have to worry that much about rain. Every environment is shifting and changing, and you have to be really smart about your resources and conservation. I wanted to be in a place where at least I got enough to conserve, and we had done research on Minnesota where we saw we would have access to these beautiful, lush landscapes and all of this greenery and lakes. It feels healthy here. It feels like you can thrive here, and the cost of living is pretty low compared to the other places.

Was your relationship to activism or thinking of yourself as an activist as well as an artist a revelation that you came to recently?

I’m an experiential learner—I think most people learn that way—but you can’t tell me information and then I retain it. I have to put things into practice in order to remember them.  I’ve never considered myself a political activist, though I think the ways in which I live and model my life is my form of activism. That’s my contribution to the evolution of Black communities. It’s the way I stay in touch with my lineage and pay forward the knowledge that I’ve gained.

“Growing up in Los Angeles, I was very much interested in the natural world around me, which was a lot of concrete. That’s probably why I focused on plants and things that grew.”

— Jovan C. Speller

It has to be put in practice because I’m not going to be the most eloquent speaker about the topic or be able to recall all of the facts, but I know that our relationship to the land is important. I know that creation and the ability to manifest is important, and what contributes to the joy and longevity of a person’s life prevents a lot of issues.

When I moved up here to Osage, I was able to take this space to be rooted in my own self and personality and give myself permission to talk about who I am, what I think the impact of my work is, and how I want people to engage with me and my work.

Your work stretches across multiple mediums that intersect and inform one another significantly. Was that purposeful for you, or more an indicator of one passion begetting another?

My passions inform the work that I do, for sure, but by “passion,” I mean the things that I have set out to be true since I can remember are now things that I get to do and live in as an adult. Growing up in Los Angeles, I was very much interested in the natural world around me, which was a lot of concrete. That’s probably why I focused on plants and things that grew.

I was always kind of fascinated by the ways in which things grew in urban environments because there’s just not a lot of space for plants to grow, which meant to me early on that there was not a lot of space for life. So maybe as early as 7, I started seeing how difficult it was to thrive and have energy and life in certain types of environments. That’s just how I came to understand the world and health and wellness and capitalism and economy and the dynamics of racialized communities.

I consider myself a bit of an archivist, and the things that I learn I put into practice, whether that’s in my artistic presence or in the ways in which I live or how I treat people or raise my family or exist within the community. I try to put those things that I’m learning into practice immediately.

You helm a festival that focuses on wintering through the lens of themes like climate change. I’d love to know what wintering means for you and the rituals you perform during this season, and how do you encourage others to do that in their home life?

I love that so much. I’ve worked with The Great Northern for a couple of years as a participant and as a speaker. So to be the executive director, I feel like it really is about rebranding the cold and letting people know that this time of year is about establishing and leaning into those new rituals that you may not feel you have access to.

My rituals are rooted in developing and doing a lot of experimentation. Last year, I really leaned into being a practitioner of seasonal living, and each season brings its own set of requirements. For me, last year was about creation. Around my land, I usually get around 3 feet of snow, so we can cut paths and prepare for the spring. I was also working with clay again as something that I wanted to bring back into my artistic practice. And I’m trying to master some soups or winter cocktails. I started playing a little bit more so that I can experiment with things to see what feels good,  what is really feeding me. I love sufficiency and sustainability to see what are the ways in which you can feed yourself from the land during the winter.

“It feels healthy here. It feels like you can thrive here, and the cost of living is pretty low compared to the other places.”

— Jovan C. Speller

Cold plunge is not necessarily a thing that is widely practiced in Black communities per se. There are some wonderful folks doing the work to show communities that cold is actually good for your cellular health and your blood circulation, and I’ve been practicing with ending my showers on cold so that I can work up to doing a full cold plunge.

When you experiment, there is this moment where you experience the invigoration of life in a way that you don’t always get to do. It really reminds you that there’s more to feel. Your body is a kind of memory that is trying to reorient itself back to what it needs best to live.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.