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Celebrate Community Mural

 

The Celebrate Community Mural is part of a multiphase public- community-engaged arts project aimed at centering aliveness within our communities. The mural was created by the community on November 2nd, 2024, at the Tracy Aviary Pia Okwai Center. The artist, Alumni of the University of Utah, Shaandiin Powell was commissioned to design a participatory, movable mural that will travel across the Wasatch Valley. Our goals are to share the Lab's vision for an "aliveness" ecological model centered on community. To remind others of the joys, the sorrows, the nature, and the complexities of being alive, this art piece incorporates various bodies, elements and reminders to breathe and resist. This mural urges the viewer to take a moment to step back and engage with what it means to be alive while viewing the mural.

This community mural project was generously supported by The School of Social and Cultural Transformation, The TRIC Mellon grant, Tracy Aviary Pia Okwai Center, Black Lives Matter Salt Lake City Chapter, The Black Birth Workers Collective, Planted Healing, and all community members who helped bring the mural to life.

Workshops

Caribbean Feminist Workshop: Being When the Body is Foreign
The partnership brought together 11 Caribbean feminist scholars conducting research and teaching at U.S academic institutions, providing an opportunity to discuss and document their lived experiences as Caribbean feminist academics in the U.S.
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Working at Aliveness
From June 10th to 12th, 2024, the Black Feminist Eco-Lab (BFEL) hosted its inaugural convening, titled "Working at Aliveness," at the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah. This gathering brought together a vibrant community of local, national, and global scholars, artists, and advocates to explore the urgent realities of ecological change through a Black feminist lens.
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Photo of UPEP participants

Portals and Windows: Teaching Aliveness Across Communities

Our Tanner Humanities Center Grant funded project “Portals and Windows: Teaching Aliveness Across Communities,” expresses our intention to create a conceptual and virtual gateway for nontraditional students to reimagine their stories through lenses of growth, change, and interdependencies. In partnership with the Utah Prison Education Project (UPEP), the BLOOMing Youth Programme sponsored by the University of the West Indies in Barbados, and the Community Folk Art Center (CFAC) of Syracuse University, we will implement a two-year curriculum that connects intergenerational groups of women and University of Utah students using art, Black feminist speculative fiction, digital archiving, and ecology-based theoretical models. Our project aims to challenge hierarchies between educators, students, incarcerated participants, and the wider community through an abolitionist and decolonial praxis that emphasizes students’ visibility and empowerment as self-narrators and knowledge producers, rather than perceived stasis based on location. More information coming soon!