LOS ANGELES — Late last year, Crenshaw Dairy Mart (CDM), a nonprofit cultural space rooted at the intersection of art and activism, announced its upcoming scholarship for the abolition and advancement of the creative economy (CDM-FAACE). The first three artists selected as Fellows are Autumn Breon, Juice Wood and Oto-Abasi Attah; they will each receive a $100,000 stipend and health care.
The theme for the inaugural fellowship is “Inglewood and Prototyping the Abolitionist Imagination”, highlighting the importance of CDM’s location in Inglewood, a historically black city from the 1960s to the 1990s (although Latinos are now the majority), bordered by South Central LA to the east, the 405 freeway to the west, and the 105 freeway to the south. All three fellows have roots in Inglewood, and they spoke about the impact housing covenants (known as redlining) and freeway construction have had on South Los Los communities of color. Angeles.
“All of these borders exist because of the highways and streets that we didn’t make, but our identities came from there,” Breon said. Hyperallergic.
“For the first cohort, it was important to say that we were in a historically black neighborhood that faced displacement,” explained CDM co-founder Alexandre Ali Reza Dorriz, citing the “stadium-driven gentrification” linked to recent construction. So-Fi Stadium.
Dorriz co-founded the Dairy Mart in 2019 with fellow artists Noé Olivas and Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. The trio met as master’s students at the University of Southern California and have since established a master’s degree in social and environmental arts at Prescott College in 2019, whose program has helped shape the scholarship.
Each Fellow not only has prior ties to Inglewood, but to the Dairy Mart itself. Breon hosted the first exhibition there, Attah painted a mural of the late rapper Nipsey Hussle on its exterior, and Wood asked the Mart to house a community refrigerator which they helped organize in 2020. These ties between the CDM and the surrounding community are key to another aspect of the fellowship called CDM Projects, where fellows are tasked with providing programs, events, workshops, or other strategies to engage with their neighbors.
Even before they opened in 2019, the CDM prioritized awareness. “They just said, ‘Hey, come break bread with us. We want you to see the Dairy Mart and tell yourself what we’re working on. Breon said. “As a result, there were all these points of connection between the creatives in the community. It feels like the fellowship is just adding infrastructure to what was already happening organically.
The second major part of the inaugural Fellowship theme is “Abolition” and all three Fellows were invited to apply based on their demonstrated commitment to art and abolition. “We looked for people who were already practicing at that intersection,” Blakeney says.
“As a team, we often talk about abolitionism as having two arms: One is abolishing systems that are traumatic for communities of color, such as police systems and prison systems,” Dorriz explained. “The other end of abolition is to be responsible for recreating systems, repairing, transforming. We exist at that last end where imagination meets healing.
For Fellows, these are not abstract concepts, but things they deal with on a daily basis that become challenges as well as fuel for their artistic practices.
“As black people, our ability to use our imaginations is often diminished, our ability to sit and think is often diminished, and our ability to occupy space is something that is not really unfathomable, because stereotypes that are forced upon us,” says Attah, who describes himself as a “visual storyteller” whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, film and animation.
Fellows do not receive on-site studio space, but instead continue to work in their own studios, meeting at the Mart for panel reviews, weekly workshops, and discussions with guest speakers who cover everything from history of art from performance and film to archiving, museology, and taxes for artists. They will present a culminating exhibition in the fall of 2023. The program also includes an internship program, connecting fellows with young artists in the community. The first iteration of the one-year fellowship is funded by a grant from an anonymous foundation, according to CDM executive director Ashley Blakeney.
