We who have gone through innumerable things must record our testimonies in books for our generations.

VGB (an abbreviation of the original name, Vagabroad) means
”Very Good Book”, which is precisely what our written journeys are. This work was birthed from an undeniable conviction that where we are is not where we will always be, and the hopeful posture of what the West calls “journaling” is how we compile the body of proof that we are living on purpose, while participating in the generational task of historicizing.

These handmade, hand pained journals (and adjacent stationery collections) are an ongoing body of work where paper surface is a medium for participatory art, commanding dignity and retaining wisdom through the maintaining of our private archives. VGB honors the journal/diary
as a Divine meeting place for teastained women whose minds— persistently under spiritual attack— are conduits of revelation, understanding, wisdom, prophecy, discernment and AUTHORity. Comprehensively, the work is a celebration of sojourning, valiance, overcoming, and taking our rightful place through testifying to and for ourselves with our private books.

Sharing the jubilance of diligently keeping a journal/diary, VGB Journals recalls the civil disobedience of taking AUTHORity over our chronology and journey through writing ourselves in all life’s seasons, while also considering the greater words we must put into writing that break curses, indict enemies, call things into order, and archive the spiritual warfare set against our strength and significance. This work affirms that journaling is an act of warfare, inclining ourselves to Truth and wisdom in stillness— the antithesis of this deranged and demonic society.

Teastained woman diarists are in direct opposition to the a world that prefers that teastained women be silly, buffooned, distracted, humiliated, unraveled, grovelling, unremembered, unwritten— and dead in every sense of the word. VGB Journals is an inspired space where the comprehensive implications of keeping our books is the discourse across stationery goods. Here you are reminded to remain unwavering in your mandate and to witness your days and times with pen and journal…

Peace, friend. My name is Chimene. I’m VGB’s artist and designer— the vessel for this mandate to reimagine stationery as a vehicle of remembrance, recording, archiving, and historicizing. My work is to encourage teastained women to honor the ancestral urgency to incline to the Creator’s voice narrating circumstance and revealing Truth, and testify into our books for the cultivation of new testaments...

In 2013 the Most High used my inability to find a journal for myself (or my budget) without silly phraseologies (“keep calm and carry on”) or much less with someone who looked like me on the cover— to nudge me to make my own journals. For the first time I noticed that there were no books that truly honored the Divine moment of transcribing our lives, declarations and indictments.

Thus began the journey of being taught the significance of the diarist tradition for my people, and the counter-cultural stance of keeping private writings that record chapters of our happenings, becomings and chronicles of the times. I have accepted my mandate, continuing in the tradition of Black outsider artists before me, who created time-durable, “primitive” artworks as they were led by celestial command.  The Most High taught me all that I know and continues to instruct me about the relationship between melanated women and the discretionery surfaces that hold our words. 

Though I much prefer handwritten letters
(naturally, as the founder of The Black Letter-Writers’ Society),
you may contact me via email, as I despises “social media”
and will be making apermanent departure from it very soon. 

When it’s time, for now, I announce shop updates
on IG stories and the VGB FaceBook page.