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?

Untitled (Bust) by Alissa Bledsoe, 2019, glazed ceramic sculpture

In the summer of 2020, artists Joseph “JD” Green, Joseph Omolayole, Alissa Bledsoe, Gerald Wiggins, Charles Stanberry, Vincent Jackson, and visual artist and former CE teaching artist Danielle Wright met to examine these questions.

What began as a three-week roundtable series quickly expanded into ongoing practice and a group exhibition, one which invited all CE artists who self-identify as Black to co-create Black aesthetic space. Participants agreed to make the group exclusive to only self-identifying Black artists, partly as an experiment based on the approach of "caucusing by race," informed by Gita Gulati-Partee and Maggie Potapchuck. Thus Blackiful was born.

Blackiful is an ongoing project that considers how individual and collective self-determination [for us] are inextricably linked, whether the space and time we share is physical or virtual.

It is our speculative praxis – one which is Black on all sides. Blackiful is how we care for one another. It is how we theorize in real-time what it means to share space while we embody serious play. Blackiful is, above all, an attitude and a state of mind. ✨ Blackiful, the exhibition, is a temporary monument to this.

Blackiful, opening Juneteenth at the Creativity Explored gallery, responds to an ongoing need for Black sanctuary space, underscoring how individual and collective self-determination are inextricably linked.

Blackiful, the group, has been and 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.

Artwork in the exhibition was self-selected by each of the 23 participating artists. The exhibition is curated by the core group of Blackiful members - Alissa Bledsoe, Charles Stanberry, Gerald Wiggins, Joseph Omolayole, Vincent Jackson, and Joseph “JD” Green and Danielle Wright.

Featured artists: Alissa Bledsoe*, Gerald Wiggins*, Joseph Omolayole*, J.D. Green*, Vincent Jackson*, Charles Stanberry, Laron Bickerstaff, Eric Boysaw, Samedi Djeimguero, Christina Marie Fong, Daniel Green, Isaac Haney-Owens, Nita Hicks, Valerie Jenkins, Lakeshia King, Ade Lewis, Tonya Lewis, Taneya Lovelace, Samantha Mathews, Ursula Matthews, Marcus McClure, Musette Perkins, Lance Rivers

*Blackiful core group artists