Founded by friends in 2021 out of freshman-year jam sessions, the Harvard Black Arts Collective is still coming of age. For the 2024 fall semester, Comp Directors Helena Hudlin ’27, Najya Gause ’26, Santi Kelly ’26, and I welcomed the largest comp class to date into our fold. Despite our recent establishment, this comp class did not know a Harvard without the BAC, and each week during comp we invited them to participate in the hardening of our self-definition.
As membership grew, external speculation around who we were and what we were doing intensified. Some assumed our space was necessarily exclusive by the sheer nature of our membership, likely accustomed to Harvard’s competitiveness and a Harvard “cool” that privileges some over others. For a moment we worried that, despite our open comp process, our mission had been overshadowed by this potentially intimidating perception. I thought back to when I initially joined BAC, drawn by the exact opposite reason. I joined the BAC because it was a uniquely inclusive space.
I had been searching for Black arts spaces and attended the BAC block party, where I was immediately welcomed and impressed by the members I met and their bond. First as a member, then in the first Visionary Team class, then as a Comp Director, now as Co-Director, I believed in the uniqueness of what the Collective was doing, independent of what it had decided not to do. Now, I am more excited than ever to introduce our amazing space to the Independent. Like the Independent, we belong to no one but ourselves. We do not believe in exclusion. We do not tell anyone they cannot belong to us. But yes, to borrow from Gwendolyn Brooks, “We real cool.”
First, we are our foundation. We are Anya Sesay ’25, Jetta Strayhorn ’25, Toussaint Miller ’25, and Mariah Norman ’25, who came together in 2021 to form a space dedicated to the tradition of Black communal art-making beyond structures that felt disconnected from Black art history and tradition. Black art has been traditionally collective, interdisciplinary, collaborative, and aware of the political stakes of Blackness—regardless of what said art decided to do with that, if anything at all.
We are taking lessons from the Black Arts Movement, the Black Power Movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and more concentrated pockets of Black arts practice to weave our culture’s artistic tradition into our structure.
We are our inaugural mixer at the Hutchins Center in 2022 featuring U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, Harvard professor Tracy K. Smith. We are “In the Shadow of Giants: A Commemorative Evening of Black Contemporary Art,” a partnership with the Chuck Stewart Estate to curate, display, celebrate, and unveil never-before-seen portraits of American icons a year from our founding. We presented a 2023 Vanguard Award to Tank and the Bangas as well as Samara Joy, and were humbled to host a panel including Nwaka Onwusa, the Chief Curator at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Jason Moran, jazz pianist and Artistic Director for Jazz at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, 6x Grammy-nominated trumpet player; and Chad Murdock, film director, writer, and editor.
We are young poets like Salome Agbaroji ’27 and myself, former Youth Poet Laureate of the United States; acutely aware of the intersection of art and civic action and the legacy that makes such overlap possible. We are indebted to the work of spaces like the Dark Room Collective which brought together iconic Black poets in Boston to uplift each others’ work. We are not pre-professional in the traditional Harvard sense, but we focus on Black art, acting as an incubator for projects through resource-sharing, co-creation, and outreach. We aim to build meaningful relationships around artistic practices, with many of us not fitting the traditional artist mold. Our founders observed that many Harvard arts spaces were constrained by rigid categories, competition, and critique.
In 1992, Dark Room Collective poet Kevin Young ’92 told The Crimson that Harvard’s literary community had “shrunk back to the Advocate,” but he believed it would eventually “burst open again.” Young’s success was attributed to his choice of unconventional writing channels, as he was not part of the Advocate or the Signet Society.
“If you just look at the Advocate, you would think the literary community is very small. The problem is that the Advocate also thinks it’s very small,” Young described. He was a member of Padan Aram, a defunct literary magazine, that he said failed for trying to emulate the Advocate. Because of Harvard’s “failure,” to bring together a “community of writers,” Young joined the Dark Room Collective.
Though much time has passed, the Black Arts Collective asks how much the structure of Harvard’s arts spaces has shifted since Young’s time, and how we can be that shift. We are a dedicated space, not just for writers or Black writers, but for Black art. We hope to be the “bursting open” that Young predicted even back then.
Part of what we are responding to is the fact that many Harvard arts spaces were not designed with Black culture and communal traditions in mind. This dominant orientation conceptualizes Black art merely as it can be squeezed into existing arts structures or as it can be relegated as essentially distinct. In Black artistic tradition, we are neither purely essentialist nor postblack. We carve space for Black invention across specific disciplines and we believe that Black art has its own convention, though it should not be essentialized to only that.
We are not only poets, painters, and performers. We are Kelly, multihyphenate model, Obama Foundation Voyager Scholarship Recipient, 2024 Fashion Director of Eleganza, and gallerist. We are Gabrielle Mitchell-Bonds ’27, writing for the Boston Art Review, receiving the Dean of Students’ Creativity Award while being a visual artist and dancing with Omo Naija x Wahala Boys Dance Troupe—a team also home to Agbaroji. We are Saira Rodriguez ’27, the PBHA’s Harvard Undergraduate Prison Education & Advocacy Coordinator and Eleganza performer. We are Leandra Bautista ’28, teen curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston and Programs Assistant at the Harvard Art Museums.
We are the youngest child of Harvard’s Black Arts family that is alive and well across spaces like Black Community and Student Theater (BlackC.A.S.T) and Indigo Magazine. In our collective, members of traditional Harvard arts and affinity institutions create together and support each other. Of course, we are Hannah Elena Alexis ’27, who performed in the Black Playwrights’ Festival, directed The Penningtons, wrote the script for her First Year Musical—as I music directed mine—and is gearing up to direct a mainstage Harvard production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
We are Isabel Wilson ’26, projected to be the first woman to perform a full college career of Hasty Pudding Theatricals in history, and therefore also the first Black woman. We are Jaia Wilensky ’27, of the Black Students Association (BSA) Board. We are Najya Gause ’26, the Music Executive of The Crimson Arts Board. We are Richardine Nbiba ’27, on the Harvard Advocate’s Poetry Board, Keely O’Gorman ’26, a member of BlackC.A.S.T who directed for the Black Playwrights’ Festival and performs with the Eritrean and East African Students Association (EESA), and we are Ottou Fouda ’26, president of Harvard Black Men’s Forum.
We are rebels with a cause, always grounding our creative and structural experiments in advocacy, inclusion, and action: like former Co-Director Marley Dias ’26, founder of #1000BlackGirlBooks, U.N. 2024 Young Activists Summit Laureate, and advocate for literary representation and against book banning. We are tastemakers like Gabby Anderson ’26, painter and pageant queen who has worked with the NFL, the NBA, and the Wal-Mart Corporation to showcase her art; and Cam Henry ’26, photographer, both of whom are also full-time varsity athletes.
We are all multihyphenates with so much overlap, and Black Arts Collective is our home base to convene, create, and combine our talents to make an impact. Last semester, we organized several exciting events, including our annual Paint the Block Party, a Graffiti Workshop with Victoria “Thirteenvic” Delvalle, a bleach-dye workshop at the Carpenter Center, and a collaborative art and archival installation with Cafe Gato Rojo.
We partnered with BlackC.A.S.T, the Associate of Black Harvard Women ABHW, and TDM 173BF to bring actress Dominique Fishback to campus and hosted a workshop with Hutchins Center and HGSE Public Art. This semester, we’re hosting open studios, curating an exhibition at Bob Shane’s studio, bringing in guests like Moses Mitchell on Feb. 4, creating a Black History Month spread with Les Adore, developing a Women’s History Month zine, collaborating with Kuumba, hosting socials, participating in Arts First, and hopefully working with Boston museums.
Gwendolyn Brooks’s innovative poem “We Real Cool,” grabs the reader with a direct, colloquial address and invites the reader to be immersed in the complex world of the poem’s “We,” with no extra fluff; showing the reader around, and letting the inherent complexity speak for itself. Consider this an—albeit somewhat more explanatory—invitation into the world of our we.
For us, “We Real Cool” reflects the understanding that Harvard is just part of the puzzle. We break rules, act with urgency, honor the past, and clear paths for the future. The current moment is perfect for harnessing Harvard’s resources and talent to create something special for Black artists. We’re excited for what’s ahead. All our events are open, and in the fall, our comp will be too!
The Black Arts Collective runs an open comp every fall—for more, check out @theblackartscollective_ on Instagram for events and our newsletter.
Alyssa Gaines ’26 (againes@college.harvard.edu) is one of the 2025 Co-Directors of the Black Arts Collective, alongside Rodriguez and Mitchell-Bonds.