This exhibition of work created during Black Girl Genius Week 2019 is an invitation to experience artworks, film, music, and photography, all making the celebration of Black girlhood visible and felt in our local, national, and worldwide communities.
Sponsored in part by SOLHOT, Whiting Foundation, Novo Foundation, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, School of Art + Design, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Black Feminisms and Digital Transformations Reading Group, and Krannert Art Museum
In Black Girlhood Celebration: Towards a Hip-Hop Feminist Pedagogy, poet and homegirl Nikky Finney names Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) as, “...the meeting house, where the soul and the eyes of Black girls connect.”
SOLHOT, envisioned by Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006, is a local and worldwide practice-based, publicly engaged, collectively organized space for Black girls to create Black girlhood anew. In every SOLHOT space, to be present means we are about respecting Black girls’ ideas, honoring their talents, and holding space together as we desire. This exhibition is an invitation to experience art works, film, music and photography made in and because of SOLHOT.
Drawn from SOLHOT’s archive and collection, this exhibition showcases art and photography made with/for Black girls and young people and photography in Columbia, South Carolina, Chicago, Illinois and Chicago Heights, Illinois (2019).
Organized by film, music, collage art, and photography, each section celebrates Black girlhood as an active, collective, political imperative that is never not without Black girls and the people who love them.
About Black Girl Genius Week
Black Girl Genius Week makes the social life of Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths celebration with Black girls public in as many ways as we can imagine. We take over the city so that everywhere we go you can't escape SOLHOT. We delight in the racialized, gendered articulations of Black girl genius and show it off.
We create new media, culture, ideas, and representations of Black girls that are genius! We advance cutting edge black girlhood art, theory and practice. We teach-in, reunion, exhibit photography and sculpture exhibitions, kick back, studio, organize with Black girls, and party together. Black Girl Genius Week in Champaign is SOLHOT's third Black Girl Genius week which includes Columbia, South Carolina, and Chicago, Illinois.
Curated by Blair Ebony Smith with Ruth Nicole Brown, Jessica Robinson, Yvette Mayorga, Christopher Smith (photography), Jayda Denise (Black Girl Film School), Tiye Johnson, Mother Nature, Ausar, Ro, Jovan Landry, Spring Valley High School (SC), Dent Middle School (SC), Long Leaf Middle School (SC), Metcalfe Community School (Chicago), District 163 Michelle Obama Middle School and Barack Obama Middle School (Chicago Heights)
