Celebrating Artists of Color

Celebrating and supporting artists of color has been an important part of our work since our very humble beginnings. We know that racism touches our lives in personal and systemic ways, and that the color of our skin affects our outcomes in education, health, finance, career, and more. At Kindred Post we make curatorial choices to find and prioritize artists of color in order to do our part to overcome the barriers they inevitably encounter due to their identity. 

We also want Kindred Post to be a place where people feel represented, at home. As a person of color myself (Asian American), I know what it's like to walk into a gallery/conference/classroom/store and think, oh, this wasn't made for me. For most of my life and even today, at almost every public place I go, I am not the target audience. 

I wonder sometimes if white people think about that: that things marketed to the "general public" are really just marketed to you, made for you. I saw a medical drawing of a black fetus growing inside a black woman circulating the internet recenly and we were all losing our minds because it was the first time any of us had ever seen a non-white fetus drawing. Women of all races get pregnant of course. Think of how many pamphlets or diagrams we have referenced as a way of imagining the intimate magic of life growing inside our bodies, and even this can only be imagined in whiteness. 

I don't mean to get off track with examples of white privilege. My point is that if Kindred Post was a medical office, when we opened we set out to have diagrams of fetuses of every color, so that each precious mom who walked in could know that in both daily life and in imagination, we know that they are real. 

We see you and you belong here. 

Further: Not only are we interested in greater equity and greater representation for artists of color, we are interested in the community-wide benefits of including and celebrating diverse worldviews. Every artist, no matter their race, imbues the things they create with parts of themselves. What they choose to see, draw, carve, weave, collect, name, interpret, share - all of these are unique to each artist, influenced by their identity and relationship to the world. The more diverse art we curate, the more truths we tell and listen to and learn from. We (each and every one of us, all races) benefit from this.

Therefore, we have been working on collecting demographic information from our artists to ensure that we have data to support our goals and our intuition. This has been a large, ongoing, evolving project, and we ourselves are learning how to ask the right questions, so we thank you for your patience and forgiveness with any of our mistakes.

A side benefit is that we now have added a collection to our website where you can see work by our artists of color. We are sharing it now, in a robust but still incomplete version. Please know that there are some artists on our website who identify as an artist of color but may not have been surveyed and filtered into this collection yet (and if this is you, you should e-mail us because that will help us with this project!). Please use this collection as a point of departure and not a definitive guide. 

Thank you for joining us in lifting up artists of color and their work. And thank you, artists, for offering a piece of yourselves to the world in this way. May we take good care of our stories and each other.