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Black Breath is performance and visual art exhibition and salon exhibition exploring the experiences of breathing and living in a Black Body. How do we live in our Black Bodies? How do we live free? FRIDAY JUNE 8th: Performances: 8:30 PM Artist Salon Conversation: 9:30 PM SATURDAY JUNE 9th: Gallery Hours 12pm – 6pm |
Nana Chinara – curator Nana Chinara
Nana Chinara creates. She’s Black, Queer, and a gleaming glitterbeam. She dreams up worlds in her body, and offers them to the stage. A performance artist, youth educator, and loquacious lover, her craft calls upon exploring sweet intimacy with the self, and seeking the truths in her heart. From contemporary to burlesque to healing to revealing, she’s fascinated with her journey to liberating her body. Her art is the lens through which she conducts self and community research on violence against young black femmes, traumatic partnerships, and multidimensional love.
Artists:
Aya Lane Lane Aya
Aya’s a gender variant healer, organizer, writer, musicmaker, and pole dancer. Through their work and organizing, they explore blackness, southern roots, healing, ritual, ancestor reverence, magic, gender, sexuality, liberation, invisibility/ hypervisibility, the power in ratchetness. After a yearlong work-study program at the pole and aerial studio Body & Pole, they became elEVATED certified (pole teacher training), Liquid Motion Certified, teaches a pole dance class specifically for queer + trans people of color.
Cat Archer Catherine Archer
Cat Archer is a non-binary martial artist, actor, youth worker, writer and a whole host of other weird and beautiful intersections, here before you and among fellow queer POC, ever asking: “Can we create that? If so, are we? If not, why?” At once inspired with a passion for documenting and archiving vis-a-vis academia, Cat has engaged a shift towards the creation, receiving, and transmission of stories about blackness, queerness, physics, space, familial roots, collective memory, and afro-future states – in their extraordinary and everyday – through performance. Personal and spiritual growth has abounded in this more earthen and embodied way of archiving. Cat recently presented solo work for the first time through the guidance of Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Helix Queer Performance Network, and teaches Kung Fu lessons in NYC.
Kalyn Jacobs Kalyn Jacobs
Kalyn Jacobs is a Cinematographer/ Photographer from Chicago, IL. A graduate of Howard University’s School of Communications, she began her career running the freelance circuit in Chicago working as a production assistant on local productions and camera operating for Rainbow Push Coalition on weekends. Set on a mission to capture emotional visual experiences, Kalyn moved her talents to Brooklyn, NY to further immerse into the film industry and work with the city’s most talented artists and directors with a story to tell.
Lee Jiménez Lee Jiménez
Lee Jiménez is a Queer, gender variant, Afro-Nuyorican self taught street photographer from The Lower East Side. Jiménez aims to amplify the voices of marginalized communities, showcase the beauty that is birthed out of struggle. Jimenez draws inspiration from the hood, street culture, and the African diaspora, allowing them to reach an audience that is often left behind in the movement for social change.
Liz Law
Liz Law is a twenty somethin’, Southern-bred nomad who discovered her love for movement many moons ago. She has allowed her classical ballet beginnings to introduce her to all the wonders of the dance realm, including pole and aerial arts. She is a proud creative partner at SLMDances, a humble yoga instructor at Sacred Brooklyn in Bedstuy and an Arts Organizer + Administrator through PURPOSE Productions. She is humbled to be able to collaborate with her friends and make magic! Black breath reigns supreme. Gratitude for the Black.
Monique Muse Dodd Monique Muse Dodd
Monique Muse Dodd (b.1994) is an NYC based artist working in photography, video, and installation. Through the use of multimedia, Dodd creates a visual vernacular that is influenced by her African Ancestry and Spiritual practice. Her work explores what it means to be black and free, and how blackness exists in the near future. Obsessed with how America consumes black and gay culture Muse interrogates how she contributes to this further commodification of black and queer identities.
SHANÉE SMITH Shanée Smith
SHANÉE SMITH is a Brooklyn-based self-identified bald and boujee community healer, visual artist, and writer who is interested in exploring movement as a means of exploring Black/ Queer identities. Throughout her creative process, she often asks ‘what can/must we do to heal’ and answers by calling in narratives of ancestors through figure drawing, film photography, and fake rap cyphers. Whether your craft encompasses storytelling, making medicines, or twerking, Shanée strongly believes that in doing so, you are reclaiming space, glo’ing up, resisting, and healing. Come heal with her.
Walesca Ambroise Rah Mi
Walesca Ambroise is a Haitian-American visual artist living in Harlem. Walesca’s photography is largely based around queer people of color, particularly folks of the African Diaspora and the experiences and emotions that they go through living under the tyranny of white supremacy. Some of Walesca’s work is currently exhibited at the Diaspora Community Center in Brooklyn, NY that was part of a group exhibition called LAKAY.
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This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council |