Funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with additional support from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the Activist-Curator Fellowship offers a unique, paid opportunity to local activists and cultural organizers who are interested in how historical materials can strengthen and support their community work. Fellows investigate archival collections in Philadelphia to uncover stories of resistance, tell those stories through a series of programs and exhibitions, and preserve the record of current activism authored and owned by their communities.
Below is the cohort of Activist-Curator Fellows that began in October 2020:
Brother Tommy Joshua Caison (he/him) is a North Philadelphia-born, faith-based community organizer and entrepreneur with deep roots in the U.S. South. His work focuses on land reclamation, local democracy, and the building of new Black communities. He is the founder and Executive Director of the Philly Peace Park and CEO of Green Wall St. LLC, an innovation firm.
Charlyn Griffith-Oro (they/honey) is an infinite media artist transmitting communications through English language, symbolism found in objects and unlikely map forms and body-based sciences like movement, birthing, and sex. They are a child of the Caribbean, born in London and raised by Harlem, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia. Charlyn interrogates wholeness through their research and subsequent socially engaged art. From food to sculpture, homesteading and fiction, they lean into their migrations as they make place-based works. Charlyn’s disruptive food technology, the @freebrunchprogram, has won numerous awards and is launching a pay nothing or what-you-wish subscription box that becomes available in Winter 2020.
Germaine Ingram (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based jazz tap dancer, choreographer, songwriter, vocal/dance improviser, oral historian, and cultural strategist. She creates evening-length pieces that explore themes related to history, collective memory, and social justice, and designs arts/culture projects that explore and illuminate community cultural history. She collaborates with artists from diverse traditions and disciplines, including jazz/experimental music composers, site-specific choreographers, dance and vocal improvisers, African diasporic culture specialists, and visual/media artists.
Wit López (they/them) is an award-winning multidisciplinary maker, performer, writer, advocate, and public speaker based in Philadelphia. Through the use of various media, their work is tied together by exploring the use of absurdity and Black Absurdism as tools for radical joy, healing, and empathy. In 2019, Wit was awarded an Independence Foundation Fellowship in the Arts for Visual Art for their practice in fiber art and woodworking, and an innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship at CCCADI in Harlem, NY. They were also one of 10 recipients of the Leeway Foundation Transformation Award for 2019. To support their curatorial work of organizing the QT Noir Arts Festival, Wit has received 2018 and 2019 Leeway Foundation Art and Change Grants.
Philadelphia born, Mississippi raised Nia Minard (she/her) was one of the 15 culinary artists in the Philadelphia Assembled Kitchen exhibit, an immersive dining experience where she served as a storyteller, recipe contributor, and one of the head chefs in the Kitchen. An advocate for food justice and sustainability, Nia currently consults for Fishadelphia Community Supported Fishery (CSF) and is a culinary instructor at Simon Gratz Mastery Charter High School. Through her work, Nia uses food as a tool to access memory and document black foodways both past and present. Nia believes that food and the narratives created around it are central to exploring and understanding the evolution of black identity. Nia is working in partnership with Khaliah D. Pitts.
Malkia Okech (she/her) is an abolitionist activist, futurist, and community archaeologist. She seeks to learn from history, act in the present, and imagine a future towards true safety and justice, free of capitalism and white supremacy. Okech is the Associate Producer for Black Spatial Relics, a Curator in the Philadelphia Black arts collective Bad Apple Commune, a Research Associate for Monument Lab, and a Digital Producer at the local creative agency Mighty Engine. For Okech, understanding layers of oppression and resistance in Philadelphia through memory and artifacts is key and can be composited into a guide for liberation.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Khaliah D. Pitts (she/her) is a writer, culinary artist, and curator. A lifelong creative and griot, she is continuously searching for new forms of expression and storytelling. Although her primary medium is writing, she finds herself exploring creation through short film, curating events and spaces of art and liberation, crafting wire jewelry and decor, and, most often, cooking, eating, and gushing about food. She dedicates her work to preserving culture, documenting stories of the African diaspora, and crafting spaces of liberation and joy. Khaliah is also a well-practiced, trauma-informed public health educator, trainer, and facilitator to audiences of all ages. Khaliah is working in partnership with Nia Minard.
muthi reed (they/them) is a poet and maker. They compose and animate light, space, and sound with personal and public archive material. They take Black aesthetics, embellish them with Black things, pull aesthetics apart, and reimagine Black citing the miraculous of the mundane. The composite icons are made and shared as sketches of sonic memory and vernacular acts of care. muthi lives bi-regionally in Philadelphia and the black belt region of the U.S. South, where their grandparents are from.
Andrea Walls (she/her) is a poet because a bunch of poets got in her head when she was young. She collects stones along the path set down by Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Gwendolyn Brooks, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Etheridge Knight, Mari Evans, Carolyn Rodgers, Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Henry Dumas, Paule Marshall, Gayl Jones, Wanda Coleman, Jayne Cortez, and many, many more. She became a photographer because she was given a camera at the moment she needed one. She knows resources matter. Her photographs want to be poems, too. She is pleased that her writing and visual art have been supported by organizations she admires, including The Leeway Foundation, VONA/Voices Workshops for Writers of Color, The Colored Girls Museum, Hedgebrook Residency for Women Authoring Change, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Women’s Mobile Museum Collective. Her work has been published in venues open to alternative styles and points of view, including Kweli, Callaloo, Solstice Literary Magazine, New Delta Review, and The Fourth River. She hopes you will find places that honor the work you do.
Resistance history interests: the sustaining influence of black joy.
Activist-Curator Fellowship Quick View:
Fellowship period: October 1, 2020 to Nov. 22, 2020; January 19, 2021 to June 30, 2021; August 1, 2021 to December 2021; February 2022 to May 2022 (approximately 18 months)
Orientation: October 19, 2020, held virtually
Fellows receive: $15,000 stipend paid in monthly installments over duration the of the project; consultation on record-keeping from PACSCL archivists
What Fellows do: conduct historical/archival research at PACSCL institutions, with support from research librarians; facilitate cultural organizing and community archiving with the Project Director
What Fellows produce: a list of 10+ items from PACSCL institutions that can be used in interpretive programs, an installation proposal, and a narrative interpretation
Culminating exhibition: September 2022