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Black Is__365: Richmond Art Installation Encourages Year-Long Celebration of Black History

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With Black Is___365, Ricky Parker of Dream For Purpose and Art 180’s Atlas teen art center are working together to spread the message that Black history deserves way more than just one month of the year.

If you have recently taken a walk by the Atlas teen art center and gallery located in Richmond’s historic Jackson Ward neighborhood, a new installation might have caught your eye. Across four large gallery windows, imposing black letters read an inviting message: “Black is__365.”

The window installation was designed by Ricky Parker, creative director at creative firm Dream For Purpose, in partnership with Art 180. It is a part of a year-long project challenging the idea that celebration around Black History Month should only last the 28 days of February. 

Black is__365 is a statement, an affirmation, but also a question for the community to answer and determine what it means to them.  

“Black History Month is not, you know, 28 days… Yes, we’re taking the opportunity to start the conversation in February, we feel passionate about Black History Month,” said Maurice Jackson, Art 180 Atlas program manager. “But with that, we’re also continuing that conversation to be celebrated for our brothers and sisters, our youth of color, Black and brown people, that it’s not just 28 days. It’s 365 days a year, 24 hours, you know what I’m saying? Every minute.”

The installation, unveiled on Feb. 1, will stay up through January 2022.  

The Black is__365 campaign is the continuation of a conversation started by a Black is Beautiful traveling billboard installation last summer. Parker and his wife, Whitney, erected Black Is Beautiful billboards in Richmond, Norfolk, and Charlottesville. Just as with the billboards, the purpose of Black is__365 is to not only empower the Black community but also to educate others and urge them to join the conversation around race.

“Just as much as this is a conversation for people who are Black, I think is a conversation for people who are non-Black, where, I think, in dialogues we have to become more open,” Parker said. “And just because it may not be who you are, who you were born as, or how you identify, it doesn’t mean this is not a conversation you should be a part of, or even be actively listening, so you can learn.”

To deepen that conversation and create engagement for the community, Art 180 will be offering youth programming and public art events. Among them are Art 180’s bi-monthly Open Studios – free, virtual art events hosted by local artists.

For artist Jowarnise Caston, leading a workshop with this mission was a no-brainer. She and musician Calvin Presents led the first open studio on Feb. 9, a painting workshop with music. 

“For me, it was exciting, because it’s a sentence that challenges you to define it. And not in a way that critiques another individual, but to challenge you to realize that Black is a multitude of things, it’s diverse,” Caston said. “[There’s] no one way to describe Black.”

Jowarnise Caston and Calvin Presents at Art 180.

And diverse was her audience at the workshop. Attendees’ ages ranged from five-year-old children to people who lived through the Black is Beautiful movement in the 1960s, Caston said. While eager children were enjoying the painting experience, the workshop offered a platform for some of the older attendees to share memories from when the Black is Beautiful movement first became prominent.

“I heard words like resilient, of course beautiful, … Black is joy,” Caston said of the workshop. “It was such a warm and happy kind of atmosphere in explaining why Black comes off in meaning to you in that way. It was really a mixture of nostalgia, learning, [and] education.” 

“It was so amazing,” she added. “There’s no way you can plan for the conversation that comes out of a workshop like that.”

To further Art 180’s mission of empowering Richmond’s youth, the organization is also launching its first artist residency program for students from Richmond Public Schools – with applications opening on March 1. 

The Edward D. Robinson Artist Residency will provide youth of color an opportunity to work with nationally recognized professional teaching artists while developing their artistic skills and building a portfolio. This year, the selected students will study under Chris Visions, a local artist, graphic novelist, “picture maker and ground shaker,” according to his website.

Parker said he hopes the project can create more inclusive places and spaces within Richmond. He also hopes to bridge the gap between Black history and American history. In fact, he insists, Black history is American history. If these stories were better integrated, he says, “I think we would have a better understanding of where we’ve come from as America, [and] even get a better understanding of the things we need to do to move forward.”

Looking forward, Parker remains intentional about celebrating Black people and cultural heritage year-round. The question isn’t what can we do next February but rather, what can we do next month?

For Jackson, when asked how he would fill in the blank in Black is__365, he burst out laughing. “Really?” he said, “I don’t know if I can put it in one word.” 

But then, with almost no hesitation, he answered, “Today, I will say Black is future 365.”

Photos via Maurice Jackson/Art 180

Painting The Streets Of Jackson Ward

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Where West Marshall meets Brook Road, a new pedestrian plaza is coming — and with local organizations like Gallery5, Venture Richmond, Big Secret, and more behind it, it’s set to brighten up the intersection through art. 

The already-colorful City of Richmond is about to get another rainbow upgrade, thanks to a grant from the Bloomberg Philanthropies Asphalt Art Initiative. After 200 cities applied for the grant, one of the sixteen $25,000 grants was jointly awarded to both Venture Richmond and City of Richmond Public Art Commission. The grant supports cities that use art to improve community safety, and creates further public engagement.

PHOTO: Site plan for the upcoming project funded by Bloomberg’s Asphalt Art Initiative in Richmond, via Venture Richmond.

Richmond’s newest project will include the intersection of West Marshall Street and Brook Road in the Arts District/Jackson Ward neighborhood. The grant will help fund a new pedestrian plaza, a parklet, and an intersection mural. The list of partners on the project is still growing, but so far includes the City of Richmond, Gallery5, Venture Richmond, Big Secret, ART 180, Vanderbilt Properties, and Walter Parks Architects. ART 180 is in charge of coordinating the public art components of the project, and Walter Parks Architects is responsible for providing in-kind design services.

“Collectively, these elements build upon the momentum of the neighborhood as the nexus of the Arts District, and enhance the route into Jackson Ward anchored by the Maggie Lena Walker Memorial Plaza a block away,” said Susan Glasser, Public Art Coordinator for the City of Richmond. “On a practical level, the project aspires to increase pedestrian traffic by enhancing safety and street life, to create a revitalized and beautified environment in an underutilized public space, and to promote civic engagement in the neighborhood.”

Venture Richmond is also donating $5,000 to the project that will come from the organization’s event Park(ing) Day design/build competition, hosted last September. Venture Richmond’s overall mission is to ensure that the City of Richmond focuses on enhanced vitality of Richmond, the downtown area, and Riverfront, along with enhancing property management services. Together with the city’s Public Art Commission, which invests in local artists to improve economic and cultural identity growth, the organization hopes to create a new destination from an existing intersection. It will not only brighten the busy section, but enhance its functionality.

PHOTO: Butterfly mural in Asheville, NC, by Sound Mind Creative. Photo by Justin Mitchell.

“It’s really exciting to see a lot of hard work by the community rewarded by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, to make changes to that intersection that make it safer and more attractive to the residents and businesses in the area,” said Max Hepp-Buchanan, Director of Riverfront and Downtown Placemaking for Venture Richmond. “In the age of Covid-19, it’s more important than ever that we design public spaces like this for people to safely gather and make social connections.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies’ main initiative is to invest in cities around the world, ensuring that there is a good focus on the arts, education, public health, and government innovation among other areas. In 2019, Michael R. Bloomberg’s Bloomberg Philanthropies — which includes all of his giving along with personal philanthropy, foundation, and Bloomberg Associates — donated $3.3 billion.

The City of Richmond is eager to hear what the public and Richmond locals want out of this project, and have made a survey for volunteers to record their opinions. The City hopes to start off its public engagement process with a bang, ensuring that the voices of locals are heard, and that the project will not impinge too much on the lives of those living around the intersection. Community members are highly encouraged to take the survey, if possible, so city officials can gather as much information as possible for a swift, smooth project timeline.

PHOTO: Underground at Ink Block in Boston, MA. Mural by Silvia López Chavez. Photo by @Rediovision.

Richmond’s newest project of the three conceptual elements hopes to further engage the community in local art, and will create a more functional intersection within the popular public intersection. 

To learn more about the initiative and follow updates, visit Venture Richmond’s website and take the community survey.

On Park(ing) Day, Celebrating Art Is a Walk In the Park(ing Space)

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If you noticed something different about your usual parking space last weekend, you weren’t alone.

Last Friday, your favorite parking spot in the city might have been occupied — not by another driver who found it quicker than you did, but by public art spaces created by Richmond-area design, architecture, and creative firms as well as artists.

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

Park(ing) Day began in San Francisco in 2005 and has evolved into a global event. It is an annual celebration of public space, in which designers and artists turn public parking spaces into temporary public parks, art installations, or other creative artistic spaces.

This year’s event was coordinated by community partner organization Venture Richmond. 20 pop-up parks were created downtown, around Carytown, the Fan, and Scott’s Addition, and on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. The organization jumped at the opportunity to head up this year’s celebration.

“For us, the opportunity to activate our downtown streets with mini-parks for the day while simultaneously raising awareness of, and promoting, the City of Richmond’s parklet program was something we just couldn’t pass up,” said Max Hepp-Buchanan, Venture Richmond’s director of riverfront and downtown placemaking.

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

For Venture Richmond, hosting this year’s event also created an opportunity to keep some of the contest-winning parklets around for the long haul.

“We look forward to working with the City of Richmond and some of our participants in the near future to install permanent parklets, adding more public space to our increasingly vibrant downtown streets,” Hepp-Buchanan said.

Park spaces opened to the public Friday morning at 9 a.m. and remained open until 4 p.m. that afternoon. The winners of the contest were announced at a happy hour at Bar Solita downtown’s arts district that evening. This year’s winners were: 

Photo by Owen FitzGerald

ART 180 has been in Richmond for 21 years, working with underprivileged and underrepresented youth, giving them a safe space to express their creativity.  They offer a number of after-school programs for kids in the city’s public schools and community centers, as well as classes for incarcerated teens. 

ART 180’s Community Program Manager, Dr. Vaughn Garland, said his organization was approached about creating a park in front of their building in Jackson Ward. 

“We love the idea,” Garland said.  “So we built a creative space. This is a space for creatives to come in and express their own interest.” 

Top Photo by Owen FitzGerald

The Art Of Richmond’s Youth

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Art 180’s annual Really Big Show will turn art by the river city’s young people into a celebratory block party on First Friday.

Art 180 will be hosting their 15th annual Really Big Show this Friday, June 7th, as part of June’s First Friday festivities. The beloved non-profit will be taking up their entire block in Jackson Ward to display and present a semester’s worth of colorful creative works by Richmond’s youth.

“Having 183 of our program participants come together in one space is pretty exciting,” said Community Program Manager Vaughn Garland. “This is a moment in which we’re not only showcasing our youth’s work, but we’re also pulling people together… We’ll be able to get the youth up onstage in front of a crowd to ask them questions, and have them tell the community about their art, and, oh, they will tell definitely tell you.”

During the event there will be lots of art to see and plenty of activities to enjoy, as well as the staged presentations of each students artwork. There will be displays both inside and outside of the Art 180 building, with more permanent installations housed inside and various student projects outside, coupled with activities centered around those project topics.

“[With] one group, we had worked on weaving with natural materials, so there will be a station set up with something that will give people a chance to experience what that looks like,” said Program Director Taekia Glass.

Each semester, the focus of the classes changes, depending on the artists who are available to teach. As artists come to Art 180 to volunteer their time and serve as program assistants and leaders, they bring with them their own talents and specialties, so during different semesters there may be visual artists, musicians, or performance artists — but there’s always something new for the students to learn about.

For Garland, the volunteers who show up year after year for Art 180’s students demonstrate the best of what Richmond has to offer. “When push comes to shove we as a city always seem to help each other out,” said Garland. “When questioned if something is going to work, the city has a philosophy that, ‘yes, it will always work.’”

This year at the Really Big Show, a class called “Cut, Copy, Paste: Assembling Identity” will be presenting collages and other works that focus on the recognition of self identity through different mediums and experiences. Program Leader Raven Mata and Program Assistant Maurice Singleton created a space at Elkhardt-Thompson Middle School where kids can let their minds run wild and learn to safely express themselves and develop their identities in a creative setting.

For Mata, creating this space was a way to reach out to Richmond youth who might be in the same position she once was herself. “When I was growing up I had problems of not having a lot of people around to help me or my community, and seeing people forget about the kids in my community. When I finally got a chance to go to college, I realized ‘wow, I can be an artist. I didn’t know artists looked like me,’” said Mata. “While you’re out here working on galleries and sets, it’s one thing, but I felt like I needed to do more for my community. I just needed to give it back to the kids around me.”

For Singleton, it was about replicating a mentoring experience he had as a child for the next generation. “When I was a kid my mom put me in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program,” said Singleton. “It opened my horizons. My ‘Big Brother’ changed my life and I learned a lot from him, so I’d love to do that in return to whoever I meet.”

Aside from the work these artists join with Art 180 to do in the middle and high school setting, they are also involved in teaching at the local juvenile detention centers. Mata and Singleton both have worked with students in these settings and couldn’t be happier that they chose to do this.

“You’re in the detention center with all these ‘grown men’ who are actually young kids, and kids at heart. The kids lose faith — they’re in the system, and they don’t see a way out,” said Singleton. “Being someone who was incarcerated and got back out and had to start over, it was one of those things that stood out. Sitting in a cell thinking, ‘I don’t know what tomorrow will look like,’ and ‘I don’t think I have a future,’ and then to be able to get out of that and come back to show those kids I was in the same situation, got my mind right and got to move past that.”

“The idea that people have of the kids in the detention centers being these bad kids is wrong,” said Mata. “There really isn’t much of a difference, they’re all loud and have something to say, but they’re all great kids who just want to have someone look out for them and talk to them. It’s about being able to go into these spaces and showing these majority black and brown kids that artists can look like them and there’s nothing stopping them from doing what they want to do and exploring those concepts.”

Students from the “Cut, Copy, Paste: Assembling Identity” class will be presenting works with a wide range of influence at the Really Big Show. Some students have focused their projects on their dreams of their future careers as bakers, astronauts, and celebrities, while others have used their work to express what it means to them to be a woman in the modern world, or how important it is to protect our planet.

Through this work, these students have learned that they can express themselves in safe ways that can influence others, and that even when things don’t go to plan, you can always find a new road to get where you want to go.

“The reformative nature of art is what we’re all about,” said Mata. “Giving kids some control at a time in their lives where this might be their only avenue of control. Their art can give them the power of self esteem, and they love it — regardless of the mess-ups and challenges.”

This is what the Art 180 program is all about — showing marginalized kids that they matter and that they can be a positive force in society through creative self expression.

“We start with 4th graders, give them a creative and safe space. And then they can join us in middle school and stick around through high school,” said Garland. “We see them for 10 years. In that way we can officially measure what it means to actually change direction 180 degrees. Even though we see change happen in 10 months, 10 years has a really clear marking point for change.”

“To me, Art 180 means family,” said Glass.

Come out to the streets surrounding the Atlas Gallery at 114 W. Marshall Street this Friday, June 7th, from 4 to 9 PM and experience the heartbeat of Richmond’s creative youth at work, and learn more about Art 180’s amazing work in the community. For more info, click here.

Photos courtesy Art 180

The Power Of The Simplest Of Actions

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This weekend, I attended Art 180, Performing Statistics, and RISE for Youth’s joint event, the Juvenile Justice Parade. It was organized by black and brown youth, all of whom have faced personal discrimination and many of whom have been personally sent through the school-to-prison-pipeline.

Chants spanned from “Fund education, not incarceration, invest in us, invest in us,” to as simple as, “Prisons don’t work!” As we marched, we each were holding at least one piece of artwork from formerly incarcerated youth, organized by Art 180, and we took their art to the streets with a moving march, literally and figuratively.

We started at a community center and ended at a park, marching through backstreets and backstreets only. I felt weird about being guided by the police car and chanting these things in the first person, but I had to set my awkwardness aside to focus on the bigger picture– the mobilization and the movement.

At the beginning and end we heard speeches (one by my friend Stephanie), songs, raps, poetry, and freestyle dances, all of which went to support a bigger cause. In the park there was an open mic after all of the scheduled speakers had gone, and I shared my poem, “Do Nothing,” with a feeling of hope.

It was absolutely essential that people would show up at this event, to participate, to engage, to learn. Despite my obvious suburban-whiteness, I was one of those people, and it mattered. Everyone who came made a difference at the event in one way or another.

Based on the title of this post, you may think my point will be that showing up is all you have to do, or that it is the simplest of actions, but neither are correct. To truly make a difference, you not only have to show up, you have to show up again, and again, and again, for whatever cause matters to you.

This seems like a lot, but it really isn’t. The simplest of actions, I will argue, is even simpler than attending an event. What can you do that will help you show up, get involved, and most importantly, spread your voice? Talking, listening, discussing. Its as simple as that. No matter who you are or what you do, you cannot change the world alone. But with a group, you can.

It recently came to my attention that we all, introverts and extroverts alike, need groups to thrive in activism, even if they’re just three other people. So, a whole year ago, I made an after-school club called TCLU (or the ACLU of Tuckahoe Middle School) and went through the bi-weekly craziness for a year (kudos to Ms McNew and Hayes). In the summer, it continued as the Teen Advocacy Group of Richmond, TAGRVA. It was a rocky rollercoaster, and not much of one at that, but eventually, through simply showing up again and again, it stabilized.

We have five people in total, and it doesn’t seem like much, but it is. My point is anyone can go anywhere if they continue to show up for and with other people. “Anyone” in that sentence is the word I had forgotten about for so long, but then we had an idea.

We decided we could expand TAG, so anyone could make their own. All they’d need is people, a time-frame, and a venue. Ours are: friends who live nearby, Wednesday evenings, and my house. It’s that simple, yet that important, to talk to other people with other backgrounds and ideas. If you are a teenager or know one who may be interested in forming a group, you can learn more at www.tagrva.com.

My point here is that even something as simple as frequently brainstorming actions with friends, or attending an event, really matters — your first step is to show up.

What I Think I See: Art 180 Teens Explore Identity and Mental Health

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Using poetry, drawing, and video work, Richmond teens in Art 180’s Atlas program delved into mental health care, wellness, and identity in their latest exhibit, “What I Think I See,” which opened earlier this month.

Featuring blind contour and gesture artwork created using observational drawing techniques, alongside poetry and video of step show performance art, the program aims to allow teens to express how they feel or struggles they are going through, serving as a creative outlet for them. 

The piece is a culmination of Art 180’s winter program with inspirations from the various classes they offer.

“There’s one class called the self-care step dance class where they talk about self-care and learn the art of step dancing,” Atlas Program Manager Michael Zetlan said. “And then there’s a poetry and painting class, then a drawing class.”

Zetlan said in the poetry and painting class, the kids wrote self-reflective poems about themselves and transcribed it into drawings in their class, whereas in the self-care step dance class, they explored  healthy living and what healthcare looks like between medication, being kind to yourself, and wellness, and then turned it into a video with the help of Jasmine Coles.

Zetlan said he hopes the kids build confidence through the program, and believes these teens, through the art, are getting to know their true selves.  

“We did have one teen who used the forum to come out to their parents, which was really moving for me,” he said. “They knew that he is gay, but they didn’t know he was trans,” he said. 

The poetry, according to Zetlan, is the most moving because there is so much passion revealed through the writing prompts. Whether it’s going to be on display for people or not, he said it’s crucial for these students to get their feelings out and be heard.  

“I can feel the kids getting more connected to themselves when I look at and read their poetry,” he said. “Especially when you see some of the separate fields and you think, oh, he’s not even paying attention, then you read the poem and realize they’re really paying attention. “That is touching to us as an organization and to me as a person.”

“What I Think I See” will be on display at ART 180, located at 114 W. Marshall St., through June 25.