Lakiba Pittman
Lakiba Pittman is an educator and creative artist. She is a Lecturer at Menlo College and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Psychology with a specialization in Consciousness, Spirituality, and Integrated Health. Her first book, Bread Crumbs from the Soul – Finding Your Way Back Home, features her original art, poetry and autobiographical reflections. She has recorded with John Santos & the Machete Ensemble, the Sons & Daughters of Lite, and was a featured dancer and singer with Malonga Casquelourd’s Congolese Music and Dance Ensemble, “Fua Dia Congo.” Lakiba also performed at the 50th Anniversary of the Black Arts Movement with the Poet’s Choir & Arkestra. In 2020, Lakiba was a featured healer presenting “Medicine for Self-Care, Love and Acceptance,” for Street Dance Activism for Global Dance Meditation for Black Liberation. She was also an Invited Oral Historian for the Institute for Diversity in the Arts for Stanford’s University Committee on Black Performing Arts. Lakiba was a featured poet for the Kickoff of the Poet Open Mic Series for the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. She is a senior certified instructor and facilitator of workshops with Stanford’s Center for Compassion & Altruism Research & Education, The Compassion Institute, and Healing Together. Her art has been featured in The Black Woman is God art exhibits held at SomARTS, and the African American Art & Culture Complex; both in San Francisco, California. During 2021, she was also one of the artists featured in the LaLuSa Online Gallery.
Lakiba has created (and continues to add to) a body of work she calls "Ancestral Images" that represent her spiritual connection to the ancestors. They come through as mask-like, and mandala-inspired Spirit Beings. As with the power of mandalas, her art draws in the eye, heart, and mind (of the viewer) in conscious and subconscious ways with messages revealed at the soul level. It is intentional that this some from this body of work are included in her book "Bread Crumbs from The Soul... Finding Your Way Back Home" because in an unspoken - yet palpable and visceral way, in the viewing of them, they help to guide one back home. Where is home? Where you know yourself, where you feel yourself, where you sense your identity, where you know yourself as God knows you ... as God. It's important to have art that speaks to the inner core as well as to the outer eye; art that provokes, or tells a story, or opens a heart, or taps loudly or softly on the brain - art that reminds you of who you are, and what you are and why you are ... art that inspires you to be all that you are and art that causes you to remember.
