I had the pleasure of working with Initiatives of Change USA on some artworks for the launch of their 2019 Narrative Change Collaborative (NCC) for the city of Richmond in Virginia. The NCC is a change-making program that connects three mentors - a.k.a. architects - with three mentees - a.k.a. weavers -for a year long program looking to disrupt negative racial narratives in the city of Richmond, Virginia (the former capital of the confederacy and second largest slave landing in North America).
I collaborated with their amazing communications director Sionne Neely on the ideation for the artworks and we came up with some really cool interesting ideas. Merging traditional African symbolism and themes with elements of the Richmond narrative.
And some time after the first part of the work was done Sionne sent me an invite to Richmond to attend the launch of the program. I couldn’t believe it, I actually read the email then put down the phone for a few hours to absorb before I responded. The experience was amazing, I got to teach a couple of workshops while I was there, met wonderful, warm people and discovered an extremely interesting city with levels on levels of history.
Sionne did a write up about the project here and explained the artwork so eloquently:
The Architects poster ‘combines symbology from the Ga ethnic group of Ghana; Berber codes from Niger; innovative architecture from Mali; three hand mudras used in meditation practices in India; and pan-African cosmograms (developed by spiritualists from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Trinidad) reconfigured to reflect important dates in Richmond and Virginia’s journey towards racial equity and justice. Together these codes illustrate the repelling of negative and chaotic energies; the importance of self and community awareness; the capacity of healing, wellness and regeneration to take shape; and the deep insight that social shifts are in the works.’
Whilst the Weavers poster ‘ reflects three hands (of the NCC architects) on a drum, the communication technology used between African communities to share critical messages of support, subversion, and preparation. The drum unearths a multitude of symbols that speak to the creative transformation of community action that is currently taking place in Richmond and Nairobi.’
This project makes my heart full of warmth and gratitude, it was a paradigm-shifting experience.