Join us from the comfort of your home for a special live virtual panel conversation.
Titled “Arts and Allies,” this is the third in a series of art talks started last year focused on BIPOC artists and their experiences providing and receiving allyship to other minority artists in the Alexandria/DC region, as well as their accounts of the arts scene — where it’s improved, where it needs improvement, and where it can go from here.
Registration requested for this virtual talk:
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About the “Art & Allies” Panelists
Nicole Wandera
Nicole WanderaNicole Wandera is an artist and activist from Nairobi, Kenya, based in Northern Virginia. She studied at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she earned her BFA in Communication Arts. Her African heritage is a vital source of inspiration, and she uses acrylic or digital mediums to capture the richness of her culture. Her work revolves around social justice and equality. She uses art as a form of catharsis to express her frustrations with oppression she faces as a black woman. Her goal is to create a visual dialogue around social justice, equality, and a future where we all prosper regardless of our race, ethnicity, whom we love, religious beliefs, and economic status. She believes in activism through creative expression.
Taryn Harris
Taryn HarrisBorn and raised in Prince George’s County Maryland, Taryn Harris is a visual artist with a passion for abstraction. Since studying chemistry, studio art and poetry at the University of Maryland she has continued her exploration of painting by working as an assistant to various DC area painters and as a museum docent. Abstraction has always been key to her work and she cites the improvisational tradition of jazz, abstract painting, language poetry and meditation among ideologies influential in her artistic development. Taking cues from abstractionists like Mildred Thompson, Gertrude Stein, Sam Gilliam, Joan Mitchell, Clyfford Still, Kandinsky, and others, she follows the age old traditions of exploring the both individual, and the collective consciousness through the medium of paint.
Her work often foregoes image in favor of the most basic interactions between colors, shapes and textures that stimulate our emotions and inner dialogues. In many ways subverting traditional image vocabulary as outlined by the canon & in other ways drawing upon formal elements of established visual language from mannerism to cubism to lyrical abstraction.
Kimchi Juice
Kimchi Juice
Helen Criales
Helen Criales
Moderated by Kristen Jeffers
Moderated by Kristen JeffersKristen Jeffers was one of the first people to bring the concept of Black urbanism to the internet and social media in 2010 by purchasing and launching The Black Urbanist domain name, which in its 11th year continues to be an online resource for Black urbanism at the intersection of feminism and queer/trans life. She is the author of the forthcoming A Black Urbanist Journey to a Queer Feminist Future, a memoir/manifesto for Black queer feminist urbanism. She is the creator of the K. Jeffers Index for Black Queer Feminist Urbanism, a guide, measure, and data center to assess the thrivance of black queer feminist urbanist people globally and curator of the Black Queer Feminist Urbanist Book Cannon and School. Finally, under the banner of Kristpattern, she shares her own journey into sustainable fashion and invites others to do the same. A sought-after public speaker and workshop leader, she makes her home just outside of Washington, DC and is a native of Greensboro, NC.
