Interview by Linda Swan. Photos by Bradley Leach.
A conversation with Weléla Mar Kindred is a dance of kindness, openness, fierce intellect, and subtle movement. It was an honor for me to spend an hour getting to know such a rare soul. Weléla was born in Southern California but identifies strongly as a member of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation as well as of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Photos by Bradley Leach and Intro by Jonathan Randall Grant
Dancer, writer, and director Weléla Mar Kindred radiates peace and warmth. Her presence is like a hug. I met her in Paris a few years ago, and my life has been all the sweeter because of our meeting.
By Holly Wren Spaulding
Despite my inexperience, what I made is beautiful to me, in part because it accomplished something I’ve strived for in my poems for a while: radical simplicity, quiet, and room for the reader to think about a single image or idea at a time. I also enjoyed engaging with the visual elements of these spare essences of language, seeing them as art objects as much as I see them as poems.
By Capucine Fachot
Lomography emailed me with a few of my favorite words: monochrome, purple, film. I was to test one of the two films they had received from Vienna. I chose to hike, and bring the light of the island onto my violet emulsion. Near Istanbul, the escape and I refused to make purple human.
It is opportunity that drives me. Because we deserve healthier, more vibrant places to live in, living out the vision to overcome obstacles and understand opportunity is a journey worth taking.
I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to see, and I didn’t know how to structure my visit. I wanted to see everything, and simultaneously, I longed to take my time with the artworks. Then, as I was meandering through the Greek and Roman statuary, all of a sudden I came to a halt…
Join contributor, Roshanda Cummings, as she explores what personal style and unchained expression look like for women in the Afrofuture movement.
“A museum is doing its job when this relationship between object and visitor is reciprocal: The visitor attentively observes the object and perhaps learns information about it, and she then applies her own experiences and “cultural baggage” to give the object meaning…”
