Show # 107

BLACK LOVE BLOOMS: 

New York Nook 

Brianna Harlan 

Opening Reception: Thurs, Sept. 10th, 6-8 pm

Dates:  Sep 10- Oct 24, 2020

Hours: Thurs-Sat, 12-6 pm

“This was love: a string of coincidences that gathered significance and became miracles.”

“How easy it was… to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”
––Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 

Hostility confronts the Black public landscape in the United States. It always has. Love sculpts the bonds in Black communities through countless acts of service and interdependence. As powerful and bonding as this love can be, it’s not often welcome when passionately and sincerely demonstrated. Black labor, tradition, and innovation receive little widespread support, credit, or understanding. This is an unacceptable state. In recognition of this, and as an immediate solution to it, artist and activist Brianna Harlan developed Black Love Blooms (BLB), a community art project generating a counter-space: a public work where Black people are loved, celebrated and openly embraced. 

The mission of BLB is to share “free flowers and messages of love to Black people, for Black people. In the path to liberation, stop to share the roses. Grace for what the world has tried to erase: Black Love. Let it Bloom.” The love notes express messages such as: “Black & Beautiful; the world gives you so much hardship. Here is something soft.” The public recipients of these flowers and notes are asked if they would accept these unconditional, loving gestures for a part of their identity that is often historically associated with struggle, erasure, hurt.

Race and public space in Chelsea, NY, is woefully under addressed. For the first time, Black Love Blooms, as a public intervention work, will have a home-base at Field Projects Gallery.  Featuring artwork and performance documents, as well as workshops hosted by Brianna Harlan, Field Projects transforms from a gallery to an interactive community hub centered on the spirit of radical gifting. BLB Flower Squads will run flowers and love notes from the space to the streets, shops, adjoining galleries and underexplored spaces of Chelsea.  Field Projects guests are invited to explore the scope of the BLB project as it has blossomed from Brianna’s initial vision into a network of reciprocity, affirmation and Black love.