Un-Adulterated Black Joy
The Piano Craft Gallery is pleased to present:
"Un-Adulterated Black Joy"
artwork by:
Alison Croney Moses, Ekua Holmes, L’Merchie Frazier, Tanya Nixon-Silberg, and Zahirah Nur Truth
Show Dates: May 5, 2023 - May 28, 2023
Opening Reception: May 5, 2023 6-8PM
Artist Talk: May 21, 2023 2PM
Gallery Hours: Fridays 6-8PM, Saturdays 12-5PM, Sundays 12-5PM
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Joy can be found on the block of our girlhood memory. It sounds like ‘Miss Mary Mack,, the tap, tap, tap from the double dutch rope, and the soft scratch of chalk on the asphalt as the hopscotch squares are drawn. It feels like the wind hitting your legs as the rope whips by in time with the heartbeat. It feels like wrung out ab muscles from the laughing as you make it through the chant and your body gets the rhythm in your hands, head, and feet.. It smells like summer time, spring and now and laters (the red kind).
Joy can be found in the memories of our bodies moving to the music at that 8th grade dance full of nerves, at the house party that felt like the floor was going to fall out from under us, at the club for some birthday that has long passed. It feels and sounds like vibrations, music of a time, heartbeats, and folding fabric adjusting to the movement of bodies. It smells like sweat, alcohol and your favorite auntie’s cigarettes.
Joy can be found in the gaze looking at these future generations as we think about our ancestors. It sounds like missing Rs and Ls and lisps from the gap in the front teeth. It sounds like ‘mama’ in the middle of the night. It smells like the changes of the bodies we have ushered in this world and held in one way or another for eternity.
Joy can be found in our 40,50,60 year old Black bodies, that have been built back after being pulled apart when making way for future generations. It sounds like groans, whispers, laughter, and catching up.
Black joy is everywhere. Black joy has always been and will always be.
In Unadulterated Black Joy, a group exhibition by Black mothers and artists, Alison Croney Moses, Ekua Holmes, L’Merchie Frazier Tanya Nixon-Silberg, and Zahirah Nur Truth, we bring this joy to the front for all to see as an act of resistance self-preservation, play and the invitation to center self-care.
The one month exhibition is a culminating event of multi-year community based art making with Black mothers from 2020 to 2022, creating space for grieving, community, love, joy, and support. The artists provided works inspired by joyful memories of their own girlhood, their children’s lives, and their experiences as adults and are accompanied by video documentation of community gatherings.
Alison Image 1
Alison Art
Alison Croney Moses creates wooden objects that reach out to your senses—the smell of cedar, the color of honey or the deep blue sea, the round form that signifies safety and warmth, the gentle curve that beckons to be touched. Her work is in the collections at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She is a recent recipient of the 2022 USA Fellowship in Craft and has been featured in American Craft Magazine.
She has worked over the past 15 years in alternative education settings to build out education programs that center the communities in which they take place.. She is currently the Associate Director at the Eliot School of Fine & Applied Arts where she founded the Teen Bridge and Artist in Residence programs to help cultivate the current and next generation of artists and leaders in art and craft. She holds an MA in Sustainable Business & Communities from Goddard College, and a BFA in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design
Ekua Holmes Image
Ekua Art
Ekua Holmes’ work is collage based and her subjects, made from cut and torn papers, investigate family histories, relationship dynamics, childhood impressions, the power of hope, faith and self-determination. Recalling a quote from American Artist, Romare Bearden, "I do not need to go looking for 'happenings,' the absurd or the surreal, because I have seen things that neither Dalí, Beckett, Ionesco nor any of the others could have thought possible; and to see these things I did not need to do more than look out of my studio window," Holmes has looked out of her window for the subjects of her collages too. Remembering a Roxbury childhood of wonder and delight she considers herself a part of a long line of Roxbury imagemakers. In this spirit, she supports those who have a calling in the arts as well as keeping her own studio practice ignited. She has created and led workshops, been a visiting artist and lecturer, and held artist residencies in public and private institutions throughout New England. In her first public art initiative, she received a Now + There Public Art Accelerator Fellowship and launched The Roxbury Sunflower Project (#RoxburySunflowerProject), now in its fourth year in which she facilitated the planting of 10,000 sunflower seeds in her native Roxbury, MA.
For her work in illustrating children’s literature, Holmes is the recipient of a Caldecott Honor, Coretta Scott King’s John Steptoe New Talent Illustrator award, Robert Siebert and Horn Book awards for her illustrations in “Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer, Spirit of the Civil Rights Movement" by Carole Boston Weatherford, her first illustration project. In 2018, she won the coveted Coretta Scott King Award for Illustration for the book, "Out of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets." In 2019 she won the 2019 Coretta Scott King Award again for her illustrations in “Stuff of Stars,” written by Marion Dane Bauer.
Ms. Holmes currently serves as Commissioner and Vice Chair of the Boston Art Commission, which oversees the placement and maintenance of public works of art on and in city of Boston properties. She is also currently Associate Director at the Center for Art and Community Partnerships at MassArt where she manages and coordinates sparc! the ArtMobile, an art-inspiring, art-transforming vehicle retrofitted to contribute to community based, multidisciplinary arts programming currently focused in Mission Hill, Roxbury and Dorchester, MA. Ekua Holmes received her BFA in Photography from MassArt in 1977.
Holmes is a recent recipient of the 2021 Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art. Founded in 2020, the Newell Flather Award for Leadership in Public Art annually honors two Massachusetts artists/curators/arts administrators in public art who have demonstrated leadership in contributing to the evolving field of public art and inspiring more just, vibrant, and welcoming public spaces and public life.
LMerchie Image
LMerchie Art 1
L’Merchie Frazier visual activist, public historian, educator, artist, innovator, and poet, is Executive Director of Creative / Strategic Planning for SPOKE Arts and was formerly Director of Education and Interpretation for the Museum of African American History, Boston/Nantucket. Her innovative focus supports social and reparative justice and the quest for civil and human rights through the lens of five hundred years of Black and Indigenous history. She was awarded the Boston Foundation Brother Thomas Fellowship.
Frazier has served the artistic community as an award winning national and international visual and performance artist in one life work “Save Me From My Amnesia”, with residencies in Brazil, Taiwan, Costa Rica, Africa, France, and Cuba. Her collected works are in the Smithsonian, the White House, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art. She is a State of Massachusetts Arts Commissioner.
Tanya Image
Tanya Art 4
Tanya Nixon-Silberg (she/her) is a Black mother, native Bostonian, educator and founding director of Little Uprisings- an organization focused on centering artivism, racial justice, and liberation with kids and their caregiving allies. Her primary artistic identities lie in puppetry and storytelling through the lens of liberation in Black childhood, womanhood and motherhood. Her puppetry productions and creative research have been funded by The Jim Henson Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Boston foundation and the Boston Cultural Council. Tanya’s work has been included in Puppet Showplace Theater, Boston Children’s Museum, Boston Public Library and her large-scale community driven artistry work has been in many arts institutions in Greater Boston including the Institute for Contemporary Art, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Peabody Essex Museum and Fuller Craft Museum. Tanya is currently in a multi-year partnership with Boston and Brookline Public Schools both at the district and school level leading anti-bias/anti-racism professional learning and curriculum development. She is also the co-leader of the Un-ADULTerated Black Joy Collective composed of 3 Black mama artists focused on bodily remembrances of childhood and joy for other Black mothers in Boston. A part of Now+There’s public art accelerator program, Tanya was funded to create her first public art piece- an eco sculpture titled, “They Did Not Know We Were Seeds” in June 2023. You will mostly find Tanya playing, radicalizing and learning from her 10 year old kid, prioritizing time with Black women, and radically imaging how we all get free together.
Zahirah Image 1
Zahirah Art
Zahirah Nur Truth is a certified arts educator, interdisciplinary artist and creative entrepreneur. Mama to Black Boys with a capital “B”!
A believer in the biggest possibilities for humanity and community.
Zahirah's connection to community is what drives her work, she believes her role is to uplift and inspire that can be through mutual aid, educational resources or community engagement and partnerships centered in art.
She can also be found speaking at workshops and panels on the topics of youth centered change in our communities, economic development and youth leadership through business development, art as a tool for self-care, how to approach social justice and racism in arts education along with the balance of being a single mom in leadership and entrepreneur.
She holds a BFA from Tufts School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she is the creator of ZNT Arts Self Care with Love workshop and the author of the accompanying book found on Amazon “ZNT Arts Self Care with Love” guided journal. When shes’s not doing all the things, you can find her slowing down vibing out to music, cooking her favorite vegan comfort foods, crafting fancy mocktails or telling jokes.
The Piano Craft Gallery, Inc. a 501(c)3 nonprofit is located in a historic Boston landmark and works to eliminate common barriers to accessing the arts such as race, education level, and class by guiding our operation through an anti-racist and inclusive lens. The Piano Craft Gallery, Inc. does this by sharing, promoting, and celebrating the work of racially, culturally, and socio-economically diverse artists of all abilities with the public. This results in diverse networks of individuals accessing the gallery space and experiencing the arts. The Piano Craft Gallery, Inc. provides a free, handicapped accessible venue in Boston where people can enjoy and learn about the diversity of art-making and performing in the Greater Boston area. Additionally, the Piano Craft Gallery, Inc. provides an affordable community venue for public and private events.
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