A Celebratory Community Forum.

Co-Sponsored by:

The Colored Girls Museum

Harriett's Bookshop

The Black Girl Literacies Project, of the Philadelphia Writing Project

The Gender Justice Fund

The Museum of Black Joy

Lincoln University's Department of Languages & Literature

What’s better than a good day spent with a friend?

If you know, you know. Don’t sit on my bed.

Ken McFarlane is a West Philadelphia based documentary and portrait photographer. He has over 20 years experience in commercial, editorial, documentary photography and filmmaking. His current body of work focuses on producing visual and audio histories of Philadelphians in the present as a means of documentation to preserve collective memory while encouraging future generations to remember, re-examine and realize their own potential.

Maya Angelou divines the divine, offering a blend of history lesson, poetic genius, and embodied performance. This is Black Joy.

A multimedia engagement with Mama Misty Sol, Boo & Naomi Momoh in conversation about the importance of ritual and collective work in the Black creative tradition.

The Tiny Farm Wagon of CultureTrust of Greater Philadelphia... ​is a mobile art classroom/greenhouse/gallery inspired by the work of George Washington Carver and dedicated to building new knowledge around community vibrancy through public art projects. Our projects identify, preserve, and promote the threads of wellness that run through Black life. We build gardens, lead workshops, curate stellar art events, Visual Art, Performance, Sound, Installation, and more. And we make delicious plant-based foods from the freshest forest foraged and locally grown ingredients.

We ask the community to consider:

​What makes us well?

What keeps us from it?

Interdisciplinary artist, Mama Misty Sol, with fresh baked bread from the Cob Oven (Furrow) a community landmark at Bartram’s Garden.

Misty Sol is a writer, visual artist, and performer from small-town Pennsylvania who creates art that explores Black people’s connections to nature, wellness, and speculation. Her paintings, children’s book illustration, stories and eco practice are heavily influenced by Black history, particularly, by her grandmother’s history as a migrant farmworker, midwife, and gifted storyteller in early 20th century America.Currently she is creating earthworks as a resident in the Lenapehoking Watershed Project. Her works have been exhibited at the Wolfhound Studio in the Zou B. Art Gallery in Chicago, Burlington College, Headlong Theatre, The Moore College of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Art Splash, and the Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia. In 2016, Misty Sol received the Leeway Transformation award, for her commitment to socially engaged art. Misty Sol has a BA in Literature from Penn State University Park and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College.

Boo, engaging young creators at Sankofa Farms 10th Anniversary event.

Boo is a Pasadena-born transdisciplinary artist crafting at the locus of audio engineering, the Black storyteling tradition, cooking, spiritualism, and movement work. They build interactive workshops and performances that ask black folk to investigate our relationships to creation, spirituality, settler colonialism, and the haunting aftermaths of systemized displacement. They are currently working on their first album and a series of short stories surrounding a hyper-industrialized Mojave Desert town and it’s exposure to dark matter.

Naomi Momoh was born in Nigeria and is now based in Philadelphia. She is a sculpture artist with a focus on fiber art techniques and manipulations.

Her work investigates the intersections between race and gender from the point of view of her childhood.  Traumas experienced during her childhood, due to these chaotic intersections are expressed through - physical deconstruction of toys / poetic deconstruction of children’s literature / fabric printing / intuitive sewing. Attempts to rebuild these memories and reconcile with her present. These memories are soft scraps / jagged soft forms colliding/ incomplete text that represent this cycle. 

JOIN US FOR WINTERFEST 2021!

Join the Black Paradise Project and Mural Arts for a community ice skating event at the Blue Cross RiverRink this Sunday! This is a free activity for Philadelphia's Black community.

Sunday, Dec 12, 2021 | 5:00-6:30PM | Blue Cross RiverRink | 101 S Christopher Columbus Blvd

A bit of inspiration on ice!

Thanks @blackparadiseproject

Ntozake Shange, A Voice for Colored Girls, everywhere.

The first 50 participants will receive Dr. Civil’s, “Experiments in Black Joy” with complementary Workbook.

Mz. Icar and Tough Dumplin will be screening 2 short films created in collaboration. The first short is titled Of Expansion. It's inspired by quarantine musings and art-making. This trippy studio visit follows 2 puppets through an art exhibition distorted by time and space. The visit features a collection of collages, photography, banners, textile studies, and mixed media pieces exploring 'what is the ideal scenario and how do we get there?' The second short film is called Covert Honey. It's a documentary on Brooklyn rooftop beekeepers and a visual record chronicling the joyous adventure of beekeeping, nestled in the urban confines of a Brooklyn rooftop. Following the screening we will discuss process, collaboration, vision and using art as a vehicle to connect with people, and explore places and spaces.

Pearl Primus, Dance, Sister, Dance…

Gwendolyn Brooks in Conversation with Studs Terkel

“Last Whipping,” by Langston Hughes. Read by Ossie Davis

You are invited to sing along, to sing out loud, to feel the spiritual lyric of solidarity and shared purpose as we prepare ourselves for a collective Black future rooted in joy. Yo! let’s learn all the words and show up at the next event, singing to the ancestors, babies and everyone in between.

Negro National Anthem

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea

Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun
Let us march on till victory is won

Stony the road we trod
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died
Yet with a steady beat
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast

God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee

Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land
Our native land

…Listen to Lucille Clinton and remember, if you ever feel alone, simply find your poet and be led back to yourself, through the spirit of your elders and ancestors you shall be renewed.