Black Artist Residencies Support Growing Demand for Black Art
Artist As First Responder’s latest round of Black Artist Residencies Focus on Environmental Justice, Social Entrepreneurship, and Literary Arts
Oakland, CA, May 13, 2022 – Artist As First Responder (AAFR) launches three artist residencies to address the historical absence of spaces and resources for emerging and mid-career Black artists. Established and stewarded by independent curator Ashara Ekundayo, AAFR is an Oakland-based organization and 6-point philanthropic and interactive arts platform that reifies, engages, and financially supports Black, Indigenous, and other Artists of Color whose creative practices heal communities and save lives.
A 2019 survey of 18 major U.S. museums found that 85.4% of works in museums are by White artists, and only 1.2% of their collections are attributed to Black artists. As a means to address historical exclusion and inequity in the arts sector, there has been a growing number of independent artist residencies offering emerging to mid-career Black artists time, space, financial support, and materials to create and research while also receiving mentorship from industry professionals. Such residencies include Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal in Dakar, Senegal, West Africa, NXTHVN co-founded by MacArthur Genius Fellow Titus Kaphar, and artist Derrick Adams, who received $1.2 million from Mellon Foundation in April 2022 to document Black culture in Baltimore, invites artists to rest and put leisure first with The Last Resort Artist Retreat. In the Bay Area, AAFR’s Ashara Ekundayo and interdisciplinary artist Erica Deeman cofounded Black [Space] Residency in 2020.
With a growing demand for their work and the ongoing call for institutional accountability and racial equity in the arts, Black-led and centered residencies provide artists the opportunity to invest in their creative practices and develop initiatives that directly serve local Black communities.
“Black creatives have always cultivated spaces beyond traditional institutions to hone their practice and build peer relationships to better navigate the arts. Our hope is that AAFR’s residencies inspire creative expansion, deep inquiry, and new connections to their subject matters,” says Ekundayo.
As a key tenant to the organization, this year’s AAFR artist residences focus on environmental justice, social entrepreneurship, and literary arts, providing working studio space, staging
gallery, production labs, and mentorship. Residents and Fellows in its inaugural season identify and explore artist-based solutions to community needs and healing:
Ietef “DJ Cavem” Vita, Climate Justice/ Social Justice Artist-in-Residence AAFR’s collaboration with food fighter and vegan hip-hop artist Ietef Vita aka “DJ Cavem”
expands the research and development goals of AAFR through the expansion of his music label Plant Based Records. AAFR will provide DJ Cavem with a remote full-time staff position, health benefits, and mentorship resources to expand the world’s first and only 100% vegan powered record label into a platform for health advocacy, storytelling, and food justice activism using the universal language that is hip-hop culture, urban agriculture, and social entrepreneurship skills-building.
Ietef's expansion initiative will focus on three essential pillars of growth for Plant Based Records including Digital and Distribution, Recruitment and Promotion, and Training and Mentoring. By the end of his AAFR Residency Vita will have achieved 3 Goals: a digital ecosystem featuring a wide range of content from music videos to plant-based recipes to stories about plant-based food and food culture with a focus on BIPOC cultural traditions and communities; the research and recruitment of new artists to Plant Based Records and the AAFR platform; and the development of a virtual training and mentorship program designed to encourage youth and emerging artists to gain new skills, find their beats (and beets), and sharpen their storytelling powers.
Christian Walker, Social Economy/Engagement Fellow
AAFR’s collaboration with Creative Director Christian Walker expands the programming goals of AAFR through his research and production of community-powered events and social media campaigns highlighting partnerships with local and national designers and facilitators, creating a Limited Edition series of wearable artworks and forums on wellness, and restorative inquiry and justice.
By the end of his AAFR Fellowship Walker will have achieved 3 Goals: a vibrant and diverse ecosystem of local and national designers and event producers working to integrate fashion and design into their established community organizing work; the draft of a Mentorship in Conscious Fashion curriculum for high school student designers; and an increased public-facing footprint via social media outreach and engagement.
Ra Malika Imhotep, Omi Black Writer’s Residency/ Poet-in-Residence Done in partnership with Black [Space] Residency, the Omi Black Writers Residency is a nine-month capstone that will welcome four Black writers -- who are working primarily as poets -- to both write and extend their practice to include visual work. Part of the unique offering of this residency is to provide support and mentorship for the writers to experiment with new forms of expression outside of their primary creative practice. Our hope is that the expansion of this art results in a deeper inquiry into the work and invites new connections to the subject matter and the media and what is offered to the community. Third Poet-in-Residence Ra Malika Imhotep is a Black feminist writer, performance artist, and cultural worker from Atlanta, Georgia who pursuing a doctoral degree in African Diaspora Studies and New Media Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.
In April 2022, they debuted their poetry collection gossypiin through Red Hen Press and is currently on tour to promote the book. Inspired by the plant medicine latent in Gossypium Herbeceum, or Cotton Root Bark, “which was used by enslaved Black women to induce labor, cure reproductive ailments and end unwanted pregnancies, gossypiin reckons with a peculiar yet commonplace inheritance of violation, survival, and self-possession”. Readers are invited to “lean in and listen good as the text interrupts the narrative silence around sexual harm, sickness, and the marks they make on black femme subjectivity.”
Who is Ashara Ekundayo and Artist As First Responder
Ashara Ekundayo — a Black feminist, interdisciplinary independent curator, cultural theologian, artist, creative industries entrepreneur, and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces — developed Artist As First Responder (AAFR) as a means to reimagine and reify artists’ fundamental purpose within society. As a construct, AAFR honors the essential and historical role that Black, Indigenous and other Artists of Color have in community healing and care. In practice, AAFR is an organization and 6-point philanthropic, interactive arts platform that acknowledges, engages, and financially supports BIPOC artists who show up first in crisis and celebration to forge solutions, heal communities, and save lives through their creative practices.
On the 20th anniversary of September 11, Ashara published the article “How 9/11 Solidified the Need for Artist As First Responder” in Smithsonian FolkLife Magazine, on how this world event influenced the formation of Artist as First Responder.
The organization offers to artists a robust ecosystem and platform for power-sharing and building through its six-point approach that includes:
● Public forums
● Print and publishing initiatives
● Exhibitions
● Artist residencies
● Mutual Aid
● Site-responsive ceremonies
AAFR reflects a greater consciousness in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond to invest in artists, healers, culture-bearers, creative businesses, and cultural groups/organizations. As affirmed in the "Artists in Action" Townhall led by The Center for Cultural Power, marginalized communities “look to the cultural sector to help break old ways of thinking and reimagine what just and equitable policies, resources, and leadership can look like for all of Oakland’s people.”
Most recently, AAFR has published the second issue of BLATANT which features writing by past Omi Black Writers resident and current Poet Laureate of San Francisco Tongo Eisen-Martin and upcoming resident Marvin K. White. This issue is currently available for free online or can be purchased through San Francisco’s Museum of African Diaspora (MoAD), and Bandung Books in Oakland, CA.
Upcoming Performances and Events From AAFR Artist In Residences
“Koncrete Garden” Listening Party in Oakland Feat. Ietef “DJ Cavem” Vita
With special guests Sage & Cedar
Studios Store, 3319 Lakeshore Ave., Oakland, CA
May 14, 7:30 PM PST
@Ietef
1619 Project: Facing Hard Parts Of Our Past To Ready For The Hard Parts Of The Present With Ashara Ekundayo and Dr. Nikole Hannah Jones
May 19, 11:30 AM PST
Register for event
NYC Vegetarian Food Festival - Feat. Ietef Vita/DJ Cavem
May 21–22, 2022
Metropolitan Pavilion, 125 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011
https://www.nycvegfoodfest.com/index.php/festival-info/saturday-schedule
Ra Malika Imhotep, Omi Black Writer’s Residency/ Poet-in-Residence May 25, 6:30–8:00 PM PST
gossypiin Book Launch (published by Red Hen Publishing, 2022)
Museum of African Diaspora
Juneteenth: Liberation Weekend
June 18–19 Feat. Ietef “DJ Cavem” Vita ( PlantBasedRecords)
Hosted by Black Cultural Zone
Liberation Park, 7101 Foothill Blvd, Oakland, CA 94605
Details TBA
Collective Rising: The Insistence of Black Bay Area Artists
June 25–November 27, 2022
Museum of Sonoma County, 425 Seventh Street, Santa Rosa, CA 95401
Co-curated by Ashara Ekundayo and Lucia Olubunmi R. Momoh
Christian Walker, Social Economy/Engagement Fellow
Pieces Dawn collection launch Summer 2022
Learn more by visiting @pieces.dawn | @studios.store
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