EO - I'm curious about what factors in the art world, or even personally, led you to decide to start your Editions business at this moment.
DA - I saw it as a perfect time because there are so many ideas that I've had on my list of projects that I want to accomplish. The editions business being one. I like the idea of transforming my ideas into paintings and into things I make that are wearable. Things that I can transform from work on walls to something that people can engage with physically, like a toy or playground equipment. I like to think about accessibility as an approach to engaging with my work. So, whenever I have an opportunity to make an edition, more than one person can have it. More than one person can engage with it. I feel like that's a part of my practice and equally beneficial to me as a maker.
EO - So, I know from prior conversations that community is at the center of your practice, which, to me, is fantastic. I've heard you have a couple of nonprofit organizations you started in Baltimore. Can you tell me a bit more about those organizations?
DA - I believe in community and making art more accessible in many ways. About three or four years ago, I became interested in establishing some nonprofit organizations in Baltimore that relate to ideas surrounding my work. Leisure is one of them, and archiving is one of my interests when making a body of work. So I established the Charm City Cultural Cultivation, a nonprofit organization with three sub-organizations.
One is the Last Resort Residency is a reset, leisure, and social engagement space with a residency component and studios. It is a space for black creators and visual art, literary, culinary, and other forms of creative output to be invited here for a month to experience a space for creativity, community, and social engagement. We hope to launch it next year at some point. We're still establishing the structure for it.
The Black Box, my digital database, is another organization focused on helping the citizens of Baltimore archive their data that family photos, or objects that can be transformed into digital files that will be stored in the database. This is something that we won't own. We will just be the gatekeepers of the data. It's also a space for artists who have done work within the black community around digitizing archive material can have open discussions and workshops with communities that help them understand the importance of archiving, how to access it, and how to share it. The programs will focus on bringing people to the space and creating a community surrounding the database that will have ownership in some way of its direction.
Zora's Den is another organization I started in Baltimore, a Black women writer's circle. They publish anthologies every two years. They just published the second issue, Ironside. Zora's Den is also a workshop format where women come together and edit their writings. Then, they have readings, and they publish their writing.