♪♪
Right now we are in
my great aunt’s home.
Which is to say this is the home my grandfather's sister.
It’s also the home that my grandparents owned together.
My grandparents generation was a part of the Great Migration.
That era when African-Americans were leaving the South and coming
to northern cities and Western states en masse
looking for a better opportunity, a better life, and to escape the the,
you know, the the violent oppression of the American South.
I mean, the Central District was the only place in the city
where black folks could buy property.
Because of that, that's where the black community was.
And that was where all of our, you know, religious
social institutions, everything was centered here.
When people are, you know, sort of congregated in a in a geographical area,
a lot of dynamic things can happen.
You can build social institutions, you can build political institutions,
build educational institutions, cultural institutions.
All those things can happen when people are in proximity to one another.
When people are spread out, it makes it much harder
to create the kind of institutions that allow us to have a sense of,
you know, cultural, social and political sort of coherence
and also advocate for ourselves in the greater society.
Right?
And so in part, the project we're doing here
is a response to that.
Myself, Rachel Kessler,
Jill Freedberg, and Alicia Johnson, we're working together
on a public engagement project around shaping some public art.
As a process of doing that work.
We created a lot of tools as artists
to go out in the community and engage them and get their feedback around
how their stories could deepen their connection to public art
and what kind of public art would they like to see.
And we didn't have a place for.
My parallel trajectory
you know, it's my responsibility to manage this property.
The property was ready
to be rented out about the same time we were, you know, thinking about what
the next iteration of that
public engagement were to possibly be.
So we self-funded the startup of the space.
- I've lived in the CD for about 16 years.
I bought my home from an elderly black homeowner.
Because I became a white resident of the Central District
I had regular exposure to the conversations that other white
residents of the central district, homeowners or otherwise, were having.
The narratives that I was hearing from
other residents who didn't have a history in the neighborhood
were really
narratives of erasure that really disregard and erase
decades of innovation and creativity and solidarity
and all the other processes that made this neighborhood what it is
and frankly made the city what it is and replace those narratives with
there was nothing here or
now that we're here, the neighborhood is better or safer.
One of my motivators for really wanting to participate in this project
and Wa Na Wari was the degree to which people with roots
in this neighborhood experience combinations
of fear and isolation today, whether they've left the neighborhood
or been able to stay in the neighborhood. That that experience of
suddenly feeling like an interloper or an outsider in the neighborhood
that raised your entire family or generations of your family
and what it feels like to be four generations into a place
and suddenly worry that your neighbors are going to call the cops on you.
Or that just for walking down the street that somebody is going to question
your right to be there.
♪♪
- The neighborhood has been changing for the past almost 30 years.
Definitely the past decade, things have accelerated the gentrification
of the neighborhood.
The neighborhood's gone from being almost 80%
black to less than 10% black.
So that's a massive change in
in every aspect of our daily lives.
The folks who
lived in the central district, you know, throughout the the 20th century.
The community that that we grew up in, that we were familiar with, that we helped
to create essentially doesn't exist, at least not in a
concentrated geographic way.
♪♪
- Inye said that informal gatherings and especially parties
historically were the settings where
organizing happened in this neighborhood.
Community organizing, movement building,
you know, resistance planning
and that displacement
reduced the ability of people to just hang out
and be in a comfortable, trusting space together.
Which means it reduced the ability of people to organize.
So I think that if people are finding a space
where they can be together and feel safe and feel trusting and have fun
and that that's an ongoing possibility and opportunity,
that that's then opening the space for people to organize and resist
the processes that are displacing people or making them feel unsafe.
♪♪
- Times like these see
me for who my neighborhood elders made me see me for the fire that I am
for the match, the kindling and the blaze, but also see me for my ash
in these trying times.
The current state of affairs.
In our current political climate, in times like these,
we have to remember we will get through this.
We always have.
Yeah.
Thank you so much for being here.
(applause)
Please make some noise.
♪♪
- I’m excited about the ideas of black artists and how they permeate the world.
I've been going to galleries since I was 18 years old and half
the people don't look up at you and treat you like you shouldn't be there.
But definitely like deconstructing the white cube where you feel like
you have to be quiet and you don't know if you know what it means.
And does that mean you're stupid and you know what I mean?
And the art world is located in that way.
And so I intentionally wanted to flip that experience and make people feel welcome.
What does it mean to bring people in?
What does it mean to use the art as a gathering space?
And so I think the house deconstructs that completely.
You feel welcome.
It feels like it's your grandmother's house,
which is what most people feel when they come through the door.
♪♪
- I think it's creating possibilities,
partly in the art that Elishebe is curating
and that we're bringing through here because it's art
that is a lot of emerging artists, artists who are contemporary
and active and engaged in community in ways, and that the art
is having a conversation with like pop culture
and with the history of black art, with the history of art,
also sort of pushing different boundaries, like experimenting with
with form, experimenting with different, like thematic ideas.
I find it like challenging and exciting,
and it requires an active and engaged audience.
- So the work that we're doing here at Wa Na Wari really is about
the way that culture strategy
really helps to
focus, refine and empower, you know, our movement work.
You know, I mean, it's an art space, you know, and, you know,
and we facilitate conversations
in an exhibition format and in a performance format
between black artists.
(slow cello music)
- I think artists are the philosophers of our time.
And so for us to kind of think about these big ideas
that we're all trying to solve in the world.
Artists are the ones that are going to be tackling those ideas in the ways that,
like we just in our hearts thinks.
- I was part of an art exhibit that helped open the gallery.
I have a really long relationship
with Elisheba Johnson, and so when I found out that this was here
and there was opportunity for me to come on board, I just showed up.
- I think there's ways that black people naturally
organize that is embodied.
Like when I think about this house, I'm from Seattle but my family is not.
My grandfather moved from South Carolina
to Chicago and bought a whole bunch of houses
that family could live in and rent from, just like his grandfather.
Right?
And it was like this upwardly mobile 20th century thing that black folks did.
Right?
So it just feels like it's part of our DNA for us to win the house
and then make sure our family of Seattle can come in and have a space here.
♪♪
-I have a friend who lives right up the street still, and he calls,
you know, what they've done to the neighborhood
at this point is the entire city, but specifically to the CD,
he calls it “terraforming”.
You know, it's when you go into a landscape or an environment and you know,
you completely and utterly transform it and remake it to suit your specific needs.
Right?
And so you treat that space
as an empty canvas, as you know, as if nothing existed there before.
And in fact to, you know, to think about what's happening in the CD
as a terraforming act, I think
is telling in terms of the psychological and emotional impact
that it has on folks who, you know, who have already been here.
Biggest thing that folks are, you know, attempting to sort of pinpoint
are, you know, how do we actually survive this?
How to, one, how do we survive it and how do we,
you know, come out on the other end in some way that feels whole?
(feet marching on we pavement)
- It's the biggest civil rights movement in history.
And so things that even my parents didn't
see moving, we're seeing moving and
people are who I
thought were apathetic, are actually moving and getting and like
wanting to be a part of the movement for Black Lives.
- It’s just, right now where,
you know, that's we're at a culmination point.
Something has to change. Something has to shift.
It's not like business as usual moment.
So here in Seattle, you know, you got, you know, King County Equity Network,
which is a burgeoning coalition, I'll say, of Black led organization
that are increasingly aligned in their analysis
of what our condition requires us to do right as a people.
- Everybody has their own work that they're doing.
So and then they're coming together on some clear points
- and thinking about how we can be more effective doing
the specific work that we're doing, but doing it with
some kind of coordination.
- Some of that is asking for land and resources and redistribution of wealth
and for the city to change, you know, inequitable policy.
- And so then that allows people to work in their specific issue
areas from gender and gender identity justice issues, you know,
such as trans rights issues to prison abolition, to media justice, to housing,
to economic and wage justice issues
just across the board, right in overlapping way.
- King County Equity Now have a lot of really amazing young people.
So it's been really cool to see them
like on a dime be like, we're going to do a march in two weeks.
They flipped UMOJA Fest to be a march and the festival.
There's these again, these natural ways that people are taking events
and moments or things that have historical resonance
for the community and then using those as organizing tools.
But but it's not even just organizing.
It's about being together.
It's about everything that we always talk about. It's about belonging.
I think everybody is joining this movement because they feel
they want to be a part of something and they feel like they belong.
(♪) oh happy day (♪♪ )
- You know, we have this piece upstairs right now
by Elise Peterson she's out of New York. I just love it.
It's got Tupac talking about thug life
and how it's like a mindset.
- It's just like that for for little white kids and rich kids.
They get to go to the military academy or ROTC
or they get to take all of this energy and put it into the armed forces.
And for a young black male, young Puerto Rican or Hispanic person,
we got to put this in the streets.
That's where our energies go.
That's the only place we have to put it.
- So then it transitions to her dancing in this field.
Tupac talking about liberation, and she talks about her own
personal liberation.
[TUPAC] Police threaten our future with guns, bullets, kidnapping our days.
Reverberated sounds in my brain. Only echoes for my pain.
Real change come when you liberate everybody.
- We're talking about this moment
about working for the liberation of black people, right?
So I think you can watch this four minute video
and actually start seeing all these touch points
and connections about what people are talking about.
And you can see somebody in the pulpit talk about systemic racism.
But to hear Tupac talk about it and you laugh a little bit
and then to hear her dancing in a field and being free,
that is something people understand much more than anything else,
what it means to, like, at least dream about being free.
- We need imaginative responses,
ways of imagining ourselves in the future, right?
That have everything to do with
us getting there on our own, you know, in ways that make sense to us.
- I'm really I'm very hopeful for the future.
I think at this moment I'm seeing a lot of creativity coming forth.
I think that we have the opportunity to really come out of this
strong as a creative community.
So yeah, I think that I'm hopeful.
- Art gives us the container to start contextualizing our experiences,
our lived experiences, who we are, how we've been treated,
how we want to be treated.
I go around proselytizing the power of art.
I believe that it actually changes and transforms us.
-Wa Na Wari is everything that's good in the Black community.
It's that porch experience, it's the intergenerational conversations,
it's the exposure to art in a way that a lot of people don't get to see it.
So Wa Na Wari means home, and it really is home.
- A really good friend said, I'm so sorry
you created this whole place around belonging and people can't gather.
And I think that kind of encapsulates
the sadness that we felt when we had to close.
I believe it was like March 18th or something like that.
I mean, I think, one, we took a moment to just grieve and just like,
be at home and be like, what's happening in the world?
But we know that we still want to meet our mission, right?
Which there's the belonging piece, there's the art piece,
and the organizing piece is always been happening.
That never stopped.
We pivoted to doing online programing.
It's actually been really exciting because artists
that I couldn't afford to fly out here, I've been able to like, hire,
you know, New York based artists like Autumn Knight and Ayana Evans and
and we feel like we're a resource for all of that, right,
For people who are organizing, people who want to see black
art and hear the voices of black people and the ideas of black people.
So all of that.
Yeah. And we were doing the work before this happened.
So it's also just an opportunity for people to highlight what we're doing.
And because, yeah, we were doing it before.
♪♪
- Wa Na Wari is about making sure the culture of black folks
that was part of this neighborhood is not erased.
- You can't really have a movement.
You can't have something that's pushing to create something for the future
without having, you know, a powerful imagination around
what's possible.
♪♪
I think a part of our role is to, you know, is to, one,
ignite that imaginary process and then continue to nourish it.
Right? Keep it alive.
Our presence here embodies that in a very active sense.
♪♪