BLATANT | A Forum on Art, Joy and Rage with host Ashara Ekundayo

Zoom Room

Tue

May 18, 2021

2:00 am

3:30 am

Not a member? Join now

About

Join us for today's program on Zoom:

Please click the link below to join the webinar:

‍https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84733715079?pwd=Nkx6TWs0RHFOZFVjNVRwalYyQlBuUT09

‍Passcode: 860330

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.

This month Ashara Ekundayo will be in conversation with Sabrina Nelson and Lezley Saar.

‍You will receive instructions to join via zoom after you sign up here. Please check your spam or junk mail folder if you don’t see the email from MoAD in you inbox.

Sabrina Nelson has been creating works for over 36 years, exhibiting in Midwest, South Florida, San Francisco CA, New Orleans Galleries and Paris, France. She has been with College for Creative Studies, College of Art & Design in Arts Administration for 25 years and with the Detroit Institute of Arts Education department for 24 years. She has taught African American Art History at CCS and Oakland University.

She has been part of the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp faculty. She is a mixed media shapeshifter and has a passion for talking to students about becoming a professional artist. She earned BFA in Fine Arts from CCS in 1991.

Lezley Saar was born in Los Angeles to artist parents, Richard and Betye Saar, in 1953. While attending San Francisco State University, she worked at KPFA radio in Berkeley as part of a Black collective; The Souls of BlackFolk, and did illustrations for her writer friends. In the late 80s, while she was pregnant with her first child, she started making altered books.

Now Her works include paintings, drawings, book-works, photography, banners, collages, dioramas, and installations. Saar’s various series; “The Atheneum”, “Anomalies”, “Mulatto Nation”, “Tooth Hut”, “Autist’s Fables”, “Madwoman in the Attic”, “Monad”, “Gender Renaissance”, “A Conjuring of Conjurors”, and “Black Garden”, deal with notions of identity, race, gender, beauty, mysticism, sanity and normalcy.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is included in museum collections such as The Kemper Museum, CAAM, LACMA, MOCA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Ackland Art Museum, The Crocker Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Hessel Museum of Art, and The Santa Barbara Museum of Art. She is currently represented by Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles, and Various Small Fires Gallery in Seoul, Korea.

Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, artist, creative industries entrepreneur and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces. Through her company AECreative Consulting Partners 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 radical Black 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 at the Bay Area Girls & Womxn of Color Collaborative and sits on the Advisory Board of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music and the Regional Advisory Board for Arts Web Alameda County. Her platform Artist As First Responder excavates, documents, and archives the stories of present-day and next generation cultural workers whose art practices heal communities and save lives. Ashara recently launched the Reflection Fund for Black Bay Area creatives and is co-founder of Black [Space] Residency, a physical container for imagination, inquiry, activity and rest.

‍www.Ashara.io