The Black School hosts 5th Black Love Fest, plans for Schoolhouse groundbreaking
21st October 2024 · 0 Comments
By Makenna Mincey
Contributing Writer
From self-love to prison abolition, a burgeoning project called The Black School is piloting an open arts school concept centered around empowering African Americans to take back leadership of their own education and advancement.
The Black School was co-founded by Shani Peters and Joseph Cullier III in 2016, inspired by the historic Rosenwald schools. It is in part a school, a studio and a festival that re-centers Black theories and ideas for advancement. By centering culture, art and community, Peters said the project puts a contemporary spin on Booker T. Washington’s initiative to put Black communities back in charge of their own education and development.
“The Black School got started as an art project between myself and my husband, Joseph,” said Peters, who is co-founder and co-director of The Black School and Black Love Fest. Peters and Cullier relocated to New Orleans from Michigan and New York respectively, in search of an ideal site for art education rooted in Black history. The couple felt New Orleans was the perfect fit for such a concept. Cullier himself is originally from Marrero, La., and was raised between there, Baton Rouge and Houston. The Black School can in some ways be seen as a continuation of his family’s legacy in education, his grandfather being the namesake of the Joseph Cullier Sr. Career Center in Marrero.
To educate the community on the work of The Black School, its team hosted the fifth annual Black Love Fest to promote its mission, at Hunter’s Field on Saturday, Oct. 5. Attendees interacted with different aspects of Black art and culture through food, music, shopping and live performances from Flagboy Giz, Angela Jelly Joseph, DJ Legatron Prime, $leazy Ez and Jaime Woods.
“We saw so much inspiration and so much potential, but not the kind of programming exactly that we wanted,” she said.
So, they started The Black School, and Black Love Fest was part of that. The one-day event was first held at Brooklyn Children’s Museum in 2017, then in Harlem at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, and then in Houston at Emancipation Park. The festival returned in 2022 after the COVID-19 pandemic with the event at New Orleans African American Museum.
Local artists and their unique cultures shape the experience each year. This year’s festival featured an art installation from Monique Lorden, a New Orleans artist and community activist. Lorden created an inflatable shotgun house sculpture, complete with a functional door and windows for an immersive art experience.
“I wanted to challenge what people see as art,” Lorden said. “Art can be an inflatable sculpture, just like it can be the murals that I paint or the books that I write or the illustrations that I draw.” Lorden said it was important for kids to see that art could be something they see every day like inflatables. Her immersive art experience was titled “Home is where the ___ is.”
“So, we know that home is where the…beauty shop is and the barbershop, and the classroom, the revolution, and the list goes on,” she said. Lorden wanted people to walk into the space and think about what home meant to them.
While each location brings new quirks, certain aspects of Black Love Fest have stayed consistent over the years. Photographer Tiffany Smith has been a part of Black Love Fest since its inception in New York. Smith brings her photo booth, complete with florals and her signature wicker throne, to capture the essence of the fest.
“I’m pulling from, like, a common visual vernacular of how people have used throne chairs…with different celebrations. Stuff like baby showers, quinceañeras…culturally it shows up through the diaspora in different ways,” Smith said.
Smith likes building elaborate sets in the studio, so her throne is a way that she can recreate that work outside of that space. It has developed as a series for her in tandem with the event, Smith said.
Black Love Fest is just one of the many aspects that make up The Black School. The school also runs after school programs, community outreach and programming, and art apprenticeships. The Black School intends to build a schoolhouse in the same neighborhood where Black Love Fest was held this year. That building would house all their programming under one roof. The team anticipates construction being completed by July 2025.
“We need diverse revenue streams to make this vision happen,” Peters said. “We want it to survive and sustain many years into the future so we launched the sustainability fund on the cusp of breaking ground for the Black Schoolhouse so that we can – 1. complete the construction…and 2. keep the building going strong for many years to come,” she added.
The Black School held an event Friday, Oct. 4, to discuss how the public could get involved. They proposed a sustainability fund called We Fund Us, which allows individuals to donate monthly.
For Peters, the Black School is more than a vision; it is a necessity. Now more than ever, she said that people are searching for community spaces to be heard and seen. And whether it is through festivals, education, or art, The Black School intends to be that space.
“Today we’re fulfilling what we know is our purpose, what we know is our ancestral assignment, which is to be what we see missing,” Peters said. “Be the change we want to see.”
This article originally published in the October 21, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
