gather | create | nourish
Our Vision
a.l.t. ^home is a creative residency and community gathering space in Westmont /Athens / Harbor Gateway North (depending on the map consulted), an unincorporated neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles. Founded in March 2021, our cultural archive sits on Menlo Avenue, illuminating the migration of Black Southern families from Alabama, Louisiana, St. Louis, and Texas during the 1950s and 60s and their subsequent settlement in the Westmont/Athens neighborhood.
Sprouting from this legacy, the a.l.t. ^home campus is growing and will include an archival studio, state-of-the-art creative production & sonic memory lab, communal gathering spaces, resident bedrooms, and an Heirloom community garden. Our offerings center Afro//queer artists, archivists, and cultural conduits on the quest for space and time to rest, heal, and incubate and grow their ideas.
Our Legacy
From our Founding Steward, jeremy de’jon guyton:
a.l.t. ^home was born from the intergenerational practice of placemaking and place-keeping, with intention and with care. My grand//parents, Bernice Grove and H.C. Guyton, were born and raised in the small farming town of Millport, AL. They met in elementary school and were later married. In search for opportunity, they migrated to St. Louis in 1953 and had their first and only child, Herbert Charles Guyton, in 1955. In 1961, they migrated to Los Angeles to reunite with Bernice’s parents, Mama Charlie Gray and Papa Henry, and her seven younger siblings, who had moved West the previous year. Here, they raised my father, ancestor Herbert Charles, and, following his passing in 1992, they raised me.
Since returning home in 2020 as a caregiver to my grand//mother, and following her subsequent ancestral transition in 2021, I’ve continued my family’s legacy of building a home that offers respite, inspiration, nourishment, and care. I’m working through my family’s 65-year-old archive: dating and labeling photos and preserving them; digitizing home movies; and, cataloging letters, receipts, memorabilia, Jet & Ebony magazines, and several greeting cards. All these memories capture a crucial layer of Los Angeles Black history – the story of many families who followed a dream across the nation to provide safety, security, and liberation to their heirs.
Our Name
My grandmother once shared that when they first viewed the house on Menlo Avenue, she noticed a big tree in the backyard and it reminded her of the farm she grew up on in Millport, AL. Today, a lemon tree sits in Westernmost corner of the garden, and thus, our name, a.l.t., stands for around the lemon tree, an acknowledgment of the land that first attracted my grandparents here, on which they tilled and planted seeds that continue to blossom today.
We gather, we create, we nourish - around the lemon tree.
H.C., Bernice, & Herbert Charles Guyton
Grandchildren of Mama Charlie Gray Grove gather in the living room of a.l.t.//home ~ 1977
H.C., Bernice, & Herbert Charles Guyton pose in the front lawn of a.l.t.//home ~ 1968
