Projects

Black Canvases (2025- )

Black Canvases (ISSN: 3066-8484), a new Black cultural (heritage) zine meant for artists, writers, scholar-practitioners, graduate students, and community leaders to share all things Black fashion, culture, data science, digital humanities, digital projects, archival work, art, and BGLAM (Black Galleries Libraries Archives and Museums). Black Canvases builds off The CoLab work done during The Relational Possibilities Project (2023 - 2024) to further explore the data and community relations of Black cultural heritage across disciplines, lived experiences, and sectors.

The Relational Possibilities Project (2023-2024)

As the seminal collaboration between The Creative CoLab, Relational Possibilities: A Remix of Aesthetic Forms Through Indigeneity and Blackness is a digital community archive data science project that explores community relations and futurist realities of Indigeneity and Blackness through artists, writers, and public art in Philadelphia. Relational Possibilities pulls together original datasets, generative artificial intelligence imagery, itch.io video games, a podcast, vignettes, and curatorial statements into two distinct, interconnected virtual museums. Through a lens of community, visitors experience the shared history of African Americans in Philadelphia through 7 Black visual and literary artists and the stories of climate racism, Indigeneity, and climate change that public art and environmental histories tell.

Experience our worlds for yourself: https://tinyurl.com/thecreativecollabproject

Research Objectives

1. What relational possibilities exist between Indigeneity and Blackness?

2. How can free open source immersive design and digital media technologies, such as generative image and voice artificial intelligence, be used to enhance and visualize Black Philadelphia’s art?

3. What does the Black Philadelphia community look like as told through its community archives as information and social advocacy work through visual and literary art?