Black Girls in Art Spaces – Night at the Museum

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art‘s Black Art Collective is working with Black Girls in Art Spaces to host a meetup for guests to connect and fellowship with other black women and nonbinary folks in the city. Along with drinks and music, there will be an opportunity to attend a guided tour of the MBMA’s current special exhibition Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides!

Black Girls in Art Spaces

Black Girls in Art Spaces is a community dedicated to connectivity, accessibility, and education in the arts through in-person and digital programming.

Founder Kaci Merriwether-Hawkins created this community in Dallas, Texas when she realized many of her social media followers were not aware of the art spaces she visited and posted about. What started as a “dream in Dallas” back in 2022 quickly spread as more cities joined the community. There have since been meetups hosted in cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and many more, all with the mission to create a safe space that prioritizes those usually excluded.

This is the very first BGIAS Meetup for Memphis!

Calida Rawles: Away with the Tides

In her first solo museum presentation, Calida Rawles envisions water as a space for Black healing. Merging hyperrealism, poetic abstraction, and water’s cultural and historical symbolisms, Rawles creates unique portraits of Black bodies submerged in and interacting with bright and mysterious bodies of water.

The water, a sort of character within the paintings, is embodied as a vital, organic, multifaceted material and historically charged space that signifies historical trauma and racial exclusion but also physical and spiritual healing.