PhD students Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum and Rikki Byrd, whose art and curation on exhibit at South Side Community Art Center in Chicago
January 8, 2024
Black Studies is proud to celebrate PhD students Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum and Rikki Byrd, whose art and curation was recently on exhibit at the renowned South Side Community Art Center in Chicago.
"…Notes on Collaborative Friendship (First floor Burroughs Gallery) is the culmination of Nnaemeka C. Ekwelum’s doctoral research on friendship, artistic collaboration, and decolonial Black political thought. Through a series of intentional and creative partnerships between him and eight other US-based artists/scholars, this project experiments with the rigor of collaborative friendship as a creative methodology in contemporary art making and knowledge production. It also affectively explores alternative ways to represent Black Studies scholarship within and beyond academic spaces of learning."