Blackiful at CE

What is it like to be a Black artist at Creativity Explored? A Black artist in general? A Black person surviving a global pandemic? A Black person navigating the world after the murder of George Floyd? What does Black artists’ self-determination look like?

In the summer of 2020, artists Joseph “JD” Green, Joseph Omolayole, Alissa Bledsoe, Gerald Wiggins, Charles Stanberry, Vincent Jackson, and visual artist and educator Danielle Wright met to discuss these questions. What began as a three-week roundtable series soon expanded into regular meetings, and eventually into a group exhibition inviting all CE artists who self-identify as Black to co-create Black aesthetic space. Blackiful artists agreed from the group’s inception to make the meetings exclusive, limiting participation to self-identified Black artists in part to experiment with the idea of "caucusing by race" (a concept borrowed from Gita Gulati-Partee and Maggie Potapchuck). As an ongoing project, Blackiful considers how individual and collective self-determination are inextricably linked, whether the space and time shared is physical or virtual. Blackiful continues to be a way for Black artists at CE to study, discuss, and support one another during the pandemic and in light of the ongoing movement for Black lives and racial justice.