Teju Abiola
“Strong,” “proud,” “Black” and “loud” are the words that repeat themselves within the illustration on a card designed by Hallmark artist Teju Abiola.
The card, titled “What Black Excellence Looks Like,” joined 10 other empowering cards included within Hallmark’s Mahogany collection: Uplifted and Empowered.
The Mahogany brand from Hallmark was created in 1962, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, in order to provide cards
directed toward African-American consumers.
Teju Abiola holding up the two cards she designed for Mahogany’s Uplifted & Inspired collection. Photo by Yasmeen Saadi
The brand has continued, aiming to create a greater sense of community and representation.
Following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, Mahogany created the Uplifted & Empowered collection focused on racial empowerment and messages for the Black community.
Mahogany selected a team of writers and illustrators for the collection who collaborated with each other to create the finished product. Abiola was one of the artists selected, and said she loved working with a team of Black women and being able to share ideas together.
“Because representation is so important, [Mahogany] really wanted to make sure the voice was genuine,” Abiola said. “But Black people aren't a monolith, so everyone was giving their own experiences. It was just kind of like figuring out what we thought could be the most important message to send.”
Within the collection, Abiola designed two cards: “Celebrating Our Sisterhood” and “What Black Excellence Looks Like.”
For “Celebrating Our Sisterhood,” Abiola worked to find a balance between showing the connection between sisters as well as showing herself as a Black woman. She decided to illustrate the Black women in her life including her sister and her friends.
“I love my sisters, I'm glad that I have each, and we have each other,” Abiola said. “And I want everyone else to know that they have that connection and it's important and it's special.”
Celebrating Our Sisterhood Encouragement Card designed by Teju Abiola. Photo by Yasmeen Saadi
For “What Black Excellence Looks Like,” Abiola illustrated a Black person with an afro because of the importance of Black hair. Although Abiola did not select the words within the afro, she wanted to portray this strength and pride in the face of the portrait.
“[The message I wanted to send was] you're amazing, you've always been, you always will be,” Abiola said.
Abiola said this card also resonated with her because of her personal experiences with embracing her natural hair.
“When I was in high school, I used to get my hair chemically straightened like my entire life,” she said. “So then I just cut it all off, and my mom was like, "why would you do this to me?" and I'm like, "I just want to see." and that's just like a whole journey that I'm sure a lot of Black women understand. But I love my hair now.”
Abiola said that as Black woman, she has had stereotypes and labels placed onto her during her life. She said although the Black experience varies, there are rooted stereotypes and hardships shared within the community.
“I want to be perceived as a Black woman because I am one, but I just want to be as much of a person as anybody else,” she said. “People assign preconceived notions or stereotypes or weird expectations, when you're like I'm just being a person, living my life. We're just people. I'd like to be as much of a person as anybody else."
What Black Excellence Looks Like Inspirational Card designed by Teju Abiola.
Photo by Yasmeen Saadi
Abiola said Black women are held to stricter standards and expectations by society.
“You have to be strong all the time,” she said. “You have to be vulnerable all the time. You have to work harder than anybody else. If you slip up, then maybe people will think you're not good or not talented.”
Through her illustrations, Abiola hopes that she is able to touch people emotionally.
“In society things happen, and it's really hard sometimes to feel like you're being appreciated or you're cared for,” she said. “So [these cards are] a nice reminder.”
Natasha Ria El-Scari
As a poet, writer, life coach and musical performer, Natasha Ria El-Scari is an artist. However, although she does not create visual art herself, El-Scari said she has developed a passion and love for visual art since she was young, and now runs the Natasha Ria Art Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri.
El-Scari first co-founded the El-Scari Harvey Art Gallery with Warren “Stylez” Harvey in 2018 in order to establish an inclusive space for underrepresented artists. Since then, Harvey has pursued his own artwork, and the gallery has been renamed the Natasha Ria Art Gallery.
El-Scari said she especially saw a need for the gallery with the increase in gentrification around Kansas City, which has caused less representation of people of color.
“It was really for underrepresented art,” she said. “So the purpose is, who are we not seeing? Or who is being pushed aside? What is the implicit bias that we’re seeing?”
El-Scari said some of these underrepresented groups included people who did not go to art school, those who were seen as too old or too young, those in the LGBTQ+ community, people of color and women.
Poet, artist and gallerist Natasha Ria El-Scari in the Natasha Ria Art Gallery. Photo by Yasmeen Saadi
“[The problem of being seen as too old] is particular for women who often take large chunks of time out of their artistic career when they’re raising children,” she said. “So then, as soon as those families are raised, they are ready to create,” El-Scari said. “They’ve got all of this energy and juice and experience and wisdom, but they’re not 27 and they’re not easily manipulated; they’re not hungry just to kiss-butt. They are powerful women, and there was not a place for them.”
When the gallery opened in 2018, El-Scari had themes each month for artwork to showcase such as an LGBTQ+ month and an over-50 month. Her first exhibit was for Women’s History Month where she was able to showcase the work of her grandmother, a big influence in El-Scari’s interest in art. Within the exhibit, El-Scari brought in 15 women ranging from age eight to 97.
Through seeing and learning about the artwork in her gallery each month, El-Scari said she was able to see differences in the forms of communication. For Women’s History Month, the difference in how women depict themselves compared to how men depict women was a comparison El-Scari said she found interesting.
“It’s expressing the duality of being a woman which I think we don’t get to see enough because we don’t hear from women’s actual experiences, it’s always someone else telling our stories.” she said. “So when I see women artists telling their own stories it definitely occurs differently, like there is beauty in the sadness, or sadness in the beauty, or anger in the beauty or frustration or power. It’s things you wouldn’t normally think of women creating.” The Natasha Ria Art Gallery not only displays and sells paintings, but also contains home-made items from jewelry to soaps to pens. Photo by Yasmeen Saadi
The art displayed in El-Scari’s gallery recently was that of Harold Smith, a Kansas City-based artist whose work consists mainly of acrylic on canvas. According to Smith’s press kit, many of his paintings reflect the complexities of being a Black man in America.
“What I love is that [Smith’s art is] so rich and vibrant with the heavy use of material,” El-Scari said. “And so to me, I always tell people the texture of his work, it yells to me, ‘Black people are worth it.’ We don’t have to just scrape to get by. We are worth extra paint on a palette knife, we are worth a canvas, our images and our beauty is worth thickness and richness. So that’s what I love about his work, is how he is passionate about his bold strokes and all the ways that he defines blackness.”
For Black artwork, El-Scari said this includes showing more than just the oppression.
“Yes, the oppression is real and it is part of our every day and we don’t want to diminish that, but we do experience tremendous amounts of joy and we have regular old problems and loves and likes and dislikes just like everybody else,” El-Scari said.
Within the gallery, El-Scari has taken steps to make the space more open and inclusive. After her first year of opening the gallery, El-Scari changed the themes to types of artwork such as abstract art or art featuring nature to avoid excluding those who did not fit within her previous themes.
She said her goal was to create a community regardless of age, gender, race or background.
“I hang my art very differently. I collage it, it’s really close, and there’s not a lot of space between the pieces,” El-Scari said.
Recently, the artist featured in the Natasha Ria Art Gallery was that of Harold Smith whose acrylic work often reflects the complexities of living as a Black man in America. Photo by Yasmeen Saadi
“And I do that on purpose because I want people to have to engage each other. If people have 12 feet between each other, they don’t have to engage each other, but it has created some really beautiful healing and honest conversations around race and gender and class and identity, challenges, all these things that seemingly can separate us.”
El-Scari said she sees herself as a guide for artists to enter a supporting and humane experience, so rather than selecting certain pieces of artwork to display, she displays those that come to her first and accepts anyone until the gallery is full.
In addition to paintings, her gallery displays hand-made jewelry, soap, prints, books written by herself as well as those she has edited and more. El-Scari said that for her, art has existed all around her through her mother’s hand-made clothing and hand-made dolls and scarves made by other women in her life.
“When you understand that each stitch is by hand, and you think about the hours and hours and hours and hours of time it takes to create, you have to look at it differently,” she said. “When you think about ethnic dishes and the amount of time it takes to cook certain foods, that is art. That’s art. And you taste it and you feel it in your soul. You know when people have poured their artistic love into something and you feel the cultural strength of it. You can feel the sadness sometimes. You feel what people are doing as they’re creating. And all of that deserves a space, all of it.”
For anyone that enters the Natasha Ria Gallery, El-Scari said she wants them to feel safe and welcome.
“I hope they feel that who they are is an important part of the human family,” she said. “And that they are free to express uniquely as themselves and that that is enough. Like who they are is absolutely enough, no matter where they are and that they are welcome,” El-Scari said.
In addition to being a gallerist, El-Scari is a writer and a poet. Her five books as well as books she has edited are sold in her gallery, along with prints and candles. Photo by Yasmeen Saadi
“I want them to feel that they can heal here, I want them to feel that they can be heard, that they are celebrated. That’s what I want from each person that comes here.”
glyneisha
glyneisha (she/her; formerly Glyneisha Johnson, however has since dropped her last name in an effort to decolonize herself from its history in slavery, and de-capitalize her name to follow concepts of inclusivity) describes herself as a polydisciplinary artist, instructor and community caretaker whose work honors Black feminist practices through Black interior design. Through her collages, drawings and installations, glyneisha celebrates the Black interior and Black culture.
While in high school, glyneisha said she was inspired by Mark Bradford, a Black American contemporary artist known for his abstract paintings.
“We actually got a chance to meet him as students,” glyneisha said. “And so, I just remember him having a really specific conversation with me, like talking about the potential he saw in me and another Black student that was in my class. And so that was, I’d say, the first artist I was really inspired by, Black artist, outside of the work in my home that I always see regularly.”
Sultry by glyneisha is a piece of her collage work. Photo by Silvia Beatriz Abisaab
Within her own home, glyneisha was inspired by the interior design of her grandmother and her mother. She said both her grandmother and mother had a process of collecting and finding objects to adorn the home. This Black interior design continues to inspire a lot of glyneisha’s work.
“I use a lot of family photographs for references for my work,” glyneisha said. “So I have this process of going through my family photographs and [going] through these photographs of my grandma’s documentation of the living room, of her personal vanity area, of the dining room and so it’s thinking about how outside of people, how objects can also become a sense of memory.”
In one of her solo shows, glyneisha brought in a family table that her family used to eat dinner on. Bringing pieces of the Black home into a space like a gallery, that has not always been accessible and open to Black people, glyneisha said, contributes to a larger purpose of decolonizing people’s experiences and feelings toward art.
“Instead of thinking about the gallery only within this white-wall context that is like historically not being for Black people or people of color. [My art is] really trying to make these safe spaces that feel familiar and really are about these experiences of connecting to the Black interior,” glyneisha said.
Aint No Way by glyneisha is a drawing part of a series of drawings centered around a couple’s breakup. Photo by Leon Jones
A lot of glyneisha’s art is centered around collage work, which she started working on steadily as an undergraduate college student.
“I think as I’ve got older, I’ve given myself permission to be multi-media oriented and really just use the materials that speak to the story that I’m trying to tell,” glyneisha said.
glyneisha said the process of creating a collage serves as a metaphor for how the collage represents Black culture.
glyneisha painting one of her pieces. Photo by Molly Stinchfield.
“[It’s] in the same way that Black culture is torn apart and pieced back together and changed with new generations and healed,” glyneisha said. “I really take on that same mending language with the nature of placing and pasting and altering these different materials in conversation with one another. And I feel like that really describes beautiful multiplicity which is the Black diaspora. But also recognizes our history, our present and our potential for Black futures.”
After seven years living in Kansas City, glyneisha moved back to her hometown of Dallas, Texas in early 2021. In addition to creating art, she is also passing on her skills to the community around her through various organizations including Strange Fruit Femmes, a community organization she and two friends started in 2019 to provide programs like oral storytelling sessions and sessions to discuss artwork and literature with other Black, brown and indigenous artists.
Another goal for glyneisha is supporting and prioritizing art for Black youth. Recently, she put together and led an 8 week Saturday school for youth 6-14. For the program, glyneisha hired local artists in the community to come and create a workshop teaching various ways to make sustainable art.
“[The program was about] giving our youth the support that they need to really imagine the best black futures for themselves, but also making art more of an opportunity for people of color,” glyneisha said. “I think it’s something that we don’t think about as an option for ourselves, like being an artist or being a community organizer, or being a creative, like living that life and it being rewarded and sustainable and appreciated by others.”
Watering Place by glyneisha is an example of her installation work centered around the Black interior. Photo by Patricia Bordallo Dibildox
Within the past two years, glyneisha said she has felt a shift in her art, and has been thinking more about sharing her skills with her community in bigger ways than displaying and selling an art piece.
“I feel like my dream that I’ve really been trying to manifest for myself is really wanting to build this center focused around Black community care, so it’s like this space that offers Black art instructors, classes for youth and adults, Black therapists, Black yoga instructors, Black dance instructors,” glyneisha said. “This space really focused around these community rituals and these concepts of transformative healing and transformative justice and community care that Black feminist practices are really rooted in.”
Coconut by glyneisha is a piece of collage work illustrating a film still from ‘Do the Right Thing.” Photo by Silvia Beatriz Abisaab