BLATANT is a forum and live zine series authored and facilitated by Independent curator and cultural strategist Ashara Ekundayo that centers the lived experiences and radical imagination of Black womxn artists and cultural workers creating across discipline and geography. Presented in conjunction with her “Artist As First Responder” platform, this monthly discussion highlights artists whose creative practices heal communities and save lives.

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This month Ashara Ekundayo will be in conversation with Alisha B. Wormsley and Tiff Massey.

Alisha B. Wormsley (Pittsburgh, PA, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work is about collective memory and the synchronicity of time, specifically through the stories of women of color, more specifically Black Women in America. Wormsley is an artist who has worked in communities around the world, helping to develop artistic ideas, celebrate identities, and organize public art initiatives for national and international audiences.

Wormsley’s work has received a number of awards and grants to support programs namely the Children of NAN film series and archive, and There Are Black People In The Future. Her work has exhibited globally. Over the last few years, Wormsley has designed several public art initiatives including Streaming Space, a 24 foot pyramid with video and sound installed in Pittsburgh's downtown Market Square, and AWxAW, a multimedia interactive installation and film commission at the Andy Warhol Museum.

Wormsley created a public program out of her work, "There Are Black People In the Future", which gives mini-grants to open up discourse around displacement and gentrification and was also awarded a fellowship with Monument Lab and the Goethe Institute. In 2020, Wormsley launched an art residency for Black creative mothers called Sibyls Shrine, which has received two years of support from the Heinz Endowments.

Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College and currently is a Presidential Post Doctoral Research Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University to research and create work around the resurgence of matriarchal energy (defined as witchcraft by white supremacy) in the African-American community.

Tiff Massey is an interdisciplinary artist from Detroit, Michigan. She holds an MFA in metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her work, inspired by African standards of economic vitality, includes both large-scale and wearable sculptures, music and performance.

Massey counts the iconic material culture of 1980’s hip-hop as a major influence in her jewelry. She uses contemporary observances of class and race through the lens of an African diaspora, combined with inspiration drawn from her experience in Detroit.

Tiff Massey is a 2015 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellowship awardee, as well as a two-time John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight Arts Challenge winner. Massey has participated in several international residencies including Ideas City (in Detroit, Athens, Greece and Arles, France) hosted by The New Museum of New York and with the Volterra-Detroit Foundation in Volterra, Italy.

Massey’s work has been exhibited in national and international museums and galleries.

Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, artist, designer, creative industries entrepreneur and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces.  Through her company AECreative Consulting Partners and her projects Omi Arts Project + Space and Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, she places artists and cultural production as essential in equitable design practices, real estate development, and movement-building.

Her intersectional worldview offers both an Afrofuturist and Black radical feminist framework to the public sector by centering the lives, traditions, and expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. Currently, Ashara serves as Chief Creative Catalyst for the Bay Area Girls & Womxn of Color Collaborative, serves on the Advisory Board of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music, and is the author and editor of the Artist As First Responder multi-media platform which excavates, documents and archives the work of artists who creative practices heal communities and save lives.

Generous support for this program is provided by Art Bridges

The Artist as First Responder Project is supported by:  African American Art & Culture Complex | Akonadi Foundation | The San Francisco Foundation Wakanda Dream Lab at Movement Strategy Center | Women’s Foundation of California