Rizpah Amadasun

An Afrocentric artist in paint and spoken word, a British Queen, descending from Benin City; my work is inspired by the on going resilient joy among the African Diaspora in the face of hate and trauma worldwide. Positivity and happiness is a choice that doesn't negate the validity of pain through experience, the self-generation of joy influences the longevity of our fight to thrive. Concepts and perspectives are integral in all of my creativity. Challenging the logic of hate and contributing to Black representation is fundamental in my poetry and art.

Ascension in the Queendom is an acrylic painting inspired by the Black woman as the creator; breathing life into everything that has the privilege to be in her path, through her freedom to love herself and everything around her other Black women realise their power and also ascend.

Chanel Jaali Marshall

Chanel Jaali is a sexologist, mental health professional, entrepreneur and both a visual and performance artist. Her goal is to create art that uplifts. Her latest project, Glow Photo Series, aims to highlight the beauty and strength that naturally occurs in Black and Brown women. When she isn’t capturing images, she is teaching sex ed through her business Jaali Co., or crocheting fashion items through her shop, FAMEousJ. Her photography work can be found on IG @chaneljaaliphotography, and on Facebook at Chanel Jaali Photography.
www.glowphotoseries.com

The work being submitted is a combination of two series: Always in Bloom and Glow Photo Series. Glow Photo Series is a traveling photo project aimed to highlight the beauty of Black and Brown women. Women of all hair textures, body types, ages, abilities, and complexions are asked to pose in a predetermined color in an attempt to shift the perspective of what the standard of beauty should be. It was important to create something that wasn't seen while scrolling through social media. Everyone deserves to be represented and everyone deserves to know that they are beautiful. So far, the project has been to DC, MD, Atlanta, Harlem, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Raleigh/Durham, Charlotte, New Orleans and more. Always in Bloom was created to show that there is beauty in you as you are, even as you are growing and evolving.

Laya Wig

LAYA WIG is a self-taught music producer, Spanish speaker, and multi-instrumentalist who has studied folk music across the Americas through various travels and spells of vagrancy. California born artist moved to the bay area at the age of 18 to attend University, and there developed an affinity for language study and ultimately travel. After several years of learning Spanish through music, being a street musician in multiple countries, and participating in various bands based in Oakland and abroad, Laya began the journey of creating a personal sonic signature that has thus far been expressed through live performance. After 4 years as a founding member of the Afro-Latin inspired band Calafia Armada, Laya created BOMBSNAX(X); a musical project that promotes black femme liberation, diy skill acquisition, and empowerment through collaboration. Through this journey of self-teaching, Laya seeks to establish a production style informed by the Black diaspora and inspired by the ingenuity and innovation of Black and Indigenous peoples. Laya is currently writing and recording a debut release of all new music and is working with several members of the Black Banjo Reclamation Project to create a co-operative style label structure that focuses on the creativity and collaboration of Black womxn and queer people.

“I Allow Myself to Dream” (Pura Presencia), is the second title off the first recorded release by BOMBSNAX(X) and the first official visual release from the project. The song was written, produced, arranged, and recorded by Laya Wig in a diy studio setting. The “on location” visuals and all editing were also done by Laya in a first attempt at self-taught film making. This song was written to capture the experience of allowing oneself to succumb to sleep and the subsequent dream world thereafter. Much like the act of creativity, sleep cannot be forced, and the act of it is not an act at all but an allowance. Through participation in the first cohort of the Black Womxn Dream Lab, Laya first learned of the idea of sleep reparations, and the disparity between the quality and deepness of sleep that Black people experience compared to others. To explore these themes visually, Laya uses images of an ethereal sleep realm alongside the unique and otherworldly landscape of Yosemite Valley. The sleeping figure awakens in a dream of a distant ancestor, where images constantly shift, change, and overlap to submerge the viewer in a stream of subconsciousness and self-love. Adorned in a 3 piece garment all made of chains, the figure represents an imagined ancestor of the Black American in California; Calafiana, the descendant of Queen Calafia. One who has native roots to California but carries the memories of the chains broken through fighting colonization.

Dom Jones

Photo by Ariff Danial

Dom Jones, from Oakland, CA, is an artist and creative entrepreneur. The Founder and Principal Artist at Dom Empire, she weaves her passion for music, media, and social justice through various projects. An International Songwriting Competition Winner in 2014, Dom released her first album, Wingspan, that same year. She graduated from Berklee College of Music in 2019 as a dual major in Songwriting and Music Business. Her music has been lauded as a beacon for social change through recognition from Berklee’s Songs for Social Change, BAMS Fest, and she is a 2019 Composer for the Hear Her Song project. Dom’s recent single, “Crazytown,” was featured in the 2020 Grammy U Conference by the Recording Academy. She is a 2020 Bakanal de Afrique Artist Fellow and will produce a new musical body of work to be presented at the Virtual Afro Urban Fesival in November 2020.

Dom Jones weaves social justice issues into messages of healing, meant to serve as alchemy, healing the masses. Her original song "Heaven" is no different, discussing a better tomorrow just beyond humanity's fingertips, if it would only embrace its differences and heal its land.

Karen Seneferu

ARTIST, Co-Curator and Founder of The Black Woman is God

Karen Seneferu is one of the most thought provoking visual artists of our time. Born and raised in Oakland California, her childhood was fed by revolutionary politics and the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley and has dedicated her life to working as an educator and artivist. Self taught in her artistic craft, Senefuru is obsessed with gathering information, imagery and ideas. As a result, her work contains a completeness that belies her brief tenure as a multimedia artist. Using natural and manufactured materials she boldly examines the ancient and contemporary, turning modern objects into artifacts. This Afrofuturistic aesthetic provides a curative intersection between technological and the spiritual. Senefuru’s is grounded in the philosophy that space has hidden meaning. Therefore, her work seeks to enter into and transform the meaning of space.

At the center of my work is beauty. Despite what I create I want beauty to be resistance to annihilation. Often times public and private domains are structures of trauma for the Black body that distort how the individual views the self. I want to challenge the dehumanizing depictions by rooting beauty in the African esthetics. I use iconic patterns, forms and colors associated to the cultural value of Africa form and in some cases, integrate those components with technology to speak to the contemporary concerns. This allows for me to dialogue with traditional African art while attempting to advance the medium of the work.

Reoccurring patterns and shapes emerge in my forms. One is the cross, that for me symbolizes peace. The shape represents the crossroad figure who becomes the place of struggles for Africans in American because the binary construct demands one give up one’s cultural identity for the possibility of belong. However, within Yourba spiritual practice, the cross is God. The Kalunga, line establishes a threshold or boundary between the world of the living and the dead associated through bodies of water, like the Atlantic Ocean. I try to gather parts of myself, my family my community into the work to not only celebrate the beauty I produced but how that production could not have existed without them. The implementation emerges as various assemblage pieces that show the constant battle of claiming the self.  However, it doesn’t always turn into but can sometimes become a beautiful struggle.

Mimi Tempestt

Mimi Tempestt is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She is a daughter of California, being born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in the bay area. She is a graduate of Mills College with a MA in Literature. Her debut collection of poems, The Monumental Misrememberings, is forthcoming with Co-Conspirator Press in November. She’s currently a creative fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco and was recently selected for participation in Lambda Literary's Writer’s Retreat of emerging LGBTQ voices for poetry in 2021. She looks forward to beginning the Critical/Creative Ph.D. in Literature at UC Santa Cruz this fall.

"Homecoming Queen" is the second single off of the EP 'Radio Imagination'. by Mimi Tempestt. This visual was created by the award-winning animator, Jenny Jokela. The concept and direction was spearheaded by Mimi Tempestt. This video is dedicated to the legend of Queen Califia, the blessings of Goddess Energy, and the traditions of sacred magic through the Divine Feminine. Being a Los Angeles native, whose ancestral roots have been established here for nearly 100 years, it was important for Mimi to showcase monuments, locations and land that truly embodies the west coast. This video is a display knowledge of the magic of this land and mythology of Queen Califia into an amazing animated phenomenon.

Dana King

Dana King is a classical figurative sculptor who creates public monuments of Black Bodies in Bronze. She studies the strength and resilience of African descendants and create pieces made of clay with her hands that are then cast in bronze.

King prefers sculptures because they inhabit space and space is power. She believes sculpture provides an opportunity to shape culturally significant memories that determine how African descendants are publicly held and remembered.

Research is fundamental to her work. When digging for threads to weave together stories of the past, there are historically generalized and racist ideologies that demand a wholesale upheaval of the normative misrepresentation of the emotional and physical sacrifices of Black peoples. African descendants deserve public monuments of truth that radiate their powerful and undying resilience created from a Black aesthetic point of view.

King’s sculptures link generations by revealing common threads: shared values, experiences, and aspirations. She knows they help those alive today compare and contrast their world with that of social pioneers, both enslaved and free, whose courage and commitment to excellence helped create a modern society. Dana King creates memories, hoping you see yourself and those you love in her work.

Trees have the capacity to feed and care for other trees, even those of different species. They protect themselves and those nearby from insect infestation. They feast on carbon dioxide and in return, oxygenate the air. Towering and ever watchful, they speak to one another and hold secrets.

There are trees on plantations where enslaved people were confined, their roots fed from the soil where the dead were buried. The trees are still standing there, swaying, remembering the losses. They continue to bear witness while creating life, seed after seed, scattered by the wind.

There were countless babies born on those plantations, who, over the centuries, were snatched and sold from a tenderness they were never allowed to enjoy. They grew up not knowing their stories, cut off from their past, their history, their connections. The mothers who birthed them had to watch their babies as they were scattered by the wind.

Trees never forget.

Marnika Shelton

Marnika Shelton, AKA Nika Cherrelle, is an engaging, vibrant, artist, educator, and activist with over 25 years of experience in the Fine Arts. Classically trained in sculpture she specializes in figurative ceramics and portraiture, Marnika uses the visual arts as a platform to drive home complex, layered, and controversial narratives. Designed to engage the viewer in conversations that challenge socially and culturally normative viewpoints around race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. She takes on topics such as indoctrination and historical prejudice by recreating stories from unexplored angles to expose longstanding impacts on society. Views of masculinity, prejudice, violence, shame, sexuality, and how fear creates difference are all within the scope of her work.
Marnika enjoys speaking in communities, classrooms, and institutions about Art, Sexuality, and Politics. Her work exists to empower and inspire people across all cultural backgrounds. By breaking down taboo, she aims to create a world where all people feel loved, honored, and respected.

Marnika Shelton is also the Founder and operator of Nika Cherrelle’s LLC.

Focusing on the paradigm of the African-American experience, Marnika’s work Focuses on the contradictions that now exist as a result of centuries of oppression. Contradictions, such as African-American beauty standards, gender stereotypes, and sexuality fuel their creative process. African-American ideals of beauty mirror the past ideals of their Caucasian counterparts. Marnika uses satire to expose how these standards have affected the esteem of a mass number of people over several generations. In the piece, Hairy Nuisance (2008), coarsely textured hair is used to create a rope, which is then tied into a noose to represent the stigma that hair can play in personal identity.
Gender stereotypes also have a major role in their work. With Dual Compensation Series (2008), sex toys are fused with standard handguns to provoke ideas of falsified, or compensated masculinity. These pieces are meant to entertain as well as raise questions about the many ways our society views the power gender paradigm.

This work exists in a world that fueled by history, stereotypes, and prejudice to question the social constructs and cultural norms that have defined society.