Video Transcript: Terms for Existence, A Black Arts Collective Show

Star Ross ’27 [Anthropology major, Visual Arts minor]

The Black Arts Collective is an informal group of artists that have come together to share our passion for the arts across lots of different media, through essays, music, videos, it’s most notably putting together exhibitions.

Nsebong Adah ’26 [African American Studies major, Visual Arts minor]

Our third curator is Ariel Sylvain, who actually came up with the entire idea for the show. It’s an exploration of Black spirituality, ritual, whether it’s the rejection of formalized religion or the exploration of demonized or unorthodox non-Western religions and spiritualities.

Aderinsola Ayeronwi ’27 [Economics major]

Hi, my name is Aderinsola, and I am one of the artists in this piece, “Terms of Existence”, and I decided to make a piece that really focuses on like what do Black people do that could be seen as a religious observance. And so I decided to do something about the hair salon being this sort of like institution for that.

Genevieve Bineza ’27 [African American Studies major, Computer Science minor]

Hello, I’m Genevieve, I’m a senior in African American Studies department, and for my piece in the Collective Show, I wanted to explore ritual within Black queer life. I focus particularly on Black queer nightlife in my piece. It is a collage that explores kind of like the queer club as like a place of like divinity or holiness.

Star Ross

This piece is a painting of my maternal grandmother’s dresser. It features all of the stuff that she likes to leave around, her jewelry, her candles, her plants, all the things that really make her, her. She’s a very vibrant person, so I definitely wanted to commemorate that. And on the other side, it has a juxtaposition of what my vanity looks like, and it’s projected over top of a charcoal drawing.

Nsebong Adah

This is a piece that I’ve made, exploring this idea of ancestral intelligence, which I see as this archive of all Black knowledge and culture. And for me, I see like the swallows as a metaphor for not only our movement, but like a collective movement throughout this imagined space of ancestral intelligence.

Star Ross

Right now, we’re standing in the CoLab in the LCA. Thank you to the LCA for allowing us to have this space so many times, it’s always fun to come up with different ways to really transform this blank canvas into something special every time.