In honor of Black History Month, Detroit’s Carr Center is hosting a handful of programs dedicated to highlighting Black artists in the city.
Gallery Director Tia Nichols tapped Detroit artist Daniel Geanes to help her curate the upcoming group exhibition BLACK, which is an acronym for “A Built Language Across Culture and Knowledge.”
“Being a Black organization representing Black arts, it made sense to continue to partner with other Black creatives and organizers to do more programming for Black History Month,” Nichols says. “So I reached out to Danny, seeing his capacity around working with me and I kind of gave him full creative control over who he thought was most appropriate for this exhibition.”
For the show, Geanes had a vision to showcase Black artists in Detroit who all have unique personal identities, as well as unique styles and approaches to their craft. He thought Black History Month was the perfect time and that Detroit, being a predominantly Black city, was the perfect place.
The exhibition includes a variety of artists — some who create work showcasing Blackness in pop culture and American media, some whose art is more abstract, some who insert Detroit culture into their work, some who primarily paint portraits of people, and some who utilize other mediums.
Nichols says that the common ground between all of the art seems to be that it is “presenting a new way of reimagining the landscape of the Black experience” and “representative of a futuristic approach to creating.”
She also feels that Geanes’s acronym for BLACK is brilliant.
“It just stuck out to me organically and it encompassed everything that I wanted the exhibit to be about,” Geanes says. “Being Black is a way of life in a sense, it’s across the nation and the world, it’s something that’s just built into somebody within a culture of people.”
The 11 artists who are a part of the exhibition include Geanes, William Matthews, Trae Isaac, Torrence Jayy, Skylar Turner, Quadre Curry, Desawna “Sis” Buford, Giovanni Gulley, Tiera Knaff, Brian Nickson, and Marlo Broughton.
The BLACK group exhibition will be open free to the public from Jan. 19 through Feb. 29, with a formal opening exhibition from 6-8 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 26 and programming centered around the show throughout February.
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