My favorite aunt, Bea, died over the summer. She wore frosty pink lipstick and snorted when she laughed (and she laughed a lot). She lived in Hawaii, Japan, Hong Kong, Alaska, on a houseboat in Florida and, longest of all, in California. She was a breast cancer survivor. She was married four times — twice to her first husband, and last to her brother’s best friend from high school. (They reconnected in their 60s, and he took care of her until the end.) She and my mom called each other Ducky.
Bea was 81 when she passed away, diminished by dementia. I regret not asking her more questions about her fascinating life when I had the chance.
Renée Alexander Craft feels the same way about her father, who died a little over a decade ago from complications related to Alzheimer’s disease. An oral historian and professor of communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she was determined not to lose the opportunity twice. So she began interviewing her 92-year-old mother about her life last year.
Carolina’s Renée Alexander Craft helps bring Panama-U.S. art exchange to Atlanta
The African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta presents Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power (Sept. 5-Nov. 2), an exhibit celebrating the decades-long collaborations between Panama’s Taller Portobelo and the U.S.-based Creative Currents Artist Collaborative. From 1995–2015, the Taller Portobelo artist retreat on Panama’s Caribbean coast and the U.S.-based Creative Currents Artist Collaborative created transformative spaces where African American and Afro-Latin artists lived, worked and dreamed together. For full story: https://college.unc.edu/2025/09/craft-art/
ATLANTA, GA, August 19, 2025 — This fall, the African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta (ADAMA) presents Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power (Sept. 5 – Nov. 2, 2025), a groundbreaking exhibition celebrating the decades-long collaborations between Panama’s Taller Portobelo and the U.S.-based Creative Currents Artist Collaborative.
Through painting, photography, performance, oral history, and cultural exchange, Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power reveals how Afro-Panamanian and African American artists have fueled activism, identity, and community through shared creative practice.
“In a time of cultural erasure and division, Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power is both archive and blueprint for liberation,” says co-curator Dr. Renée Alexander Craft, professor at UNC–Chapel Hill and leading scholar of Portobelo’s Congo traditions. “It insists on the fullness of Black life—its contradictions, its beauty, its joy, and its enduring capacity to shape the world.”
Exhibition Details
Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power
Sept. 5 – Nov. 2, 2025 | African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta
352 University Ave. SW, Atlanta GA 30310
Opening Reception: Friday, Sept. 5, 7:00 PM
Curators
Dr. Renée Alexander Craft — Black feminist writer, scholar, and educator; author of When the Devil Knocks and founder of Digital Portobelo.
Tosha Grantham — Arts advisor and founder of Middle Path Creative, bridging arts advocacy and environmental conservation.
Dr. Fahamu Pecou — Internationally recognized interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and Founder of ADAMA.
The African Diaspora Art Museum of Atlanta showcases works from Taller Portobelo and beyond, spanning three decades of Carnival-inspired art.
RoughDraft Atlanta by Sherri Daye Scott August 27, 2025
ADAMA’s next act is ‘Patacones, Paintbrushes, and Power’ (Sept. 5–Nov. 2), a visual study of the traditions, ritual, and magic of Panamanian Carnivale. The show, co-curated by Grantham, Dr. Fahamu, and Dr. Renée Alexander Craft, connects Afro-Panamanian and African American artists through painting, photography, and mixed media pieces. The title nods to the everyday—crispy smashed green plantains—and to the power of shared cultural memory. At its core, the exhibition is about how culture is carried across borders—from Portobelo to Atlanta, from the Caribbean to the American South.
Crafting Their Story
Howard Craft and Renée Alexander Craft share a commitment to storytelling to preserve history, support different perspectives, and inspire creativity.
Howard Craft is the Piller Professor of the Practice in the Department of Communication within the UNC College of Arts and Sciences.
(Maggie McIntyrel / Office of Research Communications)
Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching
‘Pay it forward’: Renée Alexander Craft celebrates Tanner Award recognition, UNC Daily TarHeel,
March 6, 2022
Renée Alexander Craft’s approach to being a professor at UNC has been shaped by the support she has received from her own teachers and mentors throughout her career.
Now as the interim chairperson for UNC’s Department of Communication, Craft wants to invest the same energy in her students’ education.
Last month, she received the Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, an award that recognizes five teachers for their inspirational teaching of undergraduates, with an emphasis on first-years and sophomores. The teachers are nominated by members of the University community.
2022 Tanner Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, The Well, March 7, 2022
The awards were created in 1952 with a bequest by Kenneth Spencer Tanner, class of 1911, and his sister, Sara Tanner Crawford (and by them on behalf of their deceased brothers, Simpson Bobo Tanner Jr. and Jesse Spencer Tanner), establishing an endowment fund in memory of their parents, Lola Spencer and Simpson Bobo Tanner. The award was established to recognize excellence in inspirational teaching of undergraduate students, particularly first- and second-year students. Each of the five winners receives a one-time stipend of $7,500 and a framed citation.
Celebrating Juneteenth and What It Means
“In 2020, Renée Alexander Craft, associate professor in the College of Arts & Sciences’ communication department, argued in a written piece that Juneteenth should be named a federal holiday. Working with Craft, who co-directs the UNC Student Learning to Advance Truth and Equity (SLATE), The Well adapted her earlier article into the following Q & A. [. . .]
What is your vision for Juneteenth?
MLK Day is a day of service and reflection that focuses on the life and civil rights accomplishments of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Black History month honors African American contributions to the nation and is a designated time to center knowledge that is often marginalized the other 11 months of the year. But these do not explicitly call the nation to collectively celebrate and recommit itself to the project of Black freedom.
Juneteenth ought to be both a federal celebration and an annual reckoning on race that prompts government agencies, as well as private industry, to evaluate the ways in which their policies facilitate or frustrate Black experiences of equity and inclusion.
On this one-year anniversary of Juneteenth commemorations being elevated to the status of federal holiday, I wonder anew: What would it mean to give a national mandate to close banks and post offices, to halt regular business practices and to fill parks and city streets (honoring COVID-19 protective measures) with celebrations marking the much-delayed but greatly celebrated news that slavery had finally ended? What would it mean for the nation to collectively celebrate Black liberation? What would it mean to our shared American experience for white people, even in predominantly white spaces, to celebrate Black freedom?”
Afrofuturism and Teaching the “Black Fantastic”
“The Black fantastic,” Tuesday, September 29th, 2020
Today’s world resembles the apocalypses described in science fiction and other speculative fiction, especially for Black people. “We are dealing with multiple waves of crises at the same time,” said Renee Alexander Craft, associate professor in the communication department and the curriculum in global studies. “Now, we’re surrounded by so much hopelessness and a feeling of so much crushing down. Afrofuturism can be a way of nurturing hope and cultivating hopefulness.”
Alexander Craft teaches COMM62: African American Literature and Performance, which focuses on Afrofuturism. “It’s what I call the Black fantastic,” she said. “It tells us about who we are and what we might be.”
Performance Studies Teach Students to Value Underrepresented Communities
March 21, 2019 Insight Into Diversity
“Renée Alexander Craft, PhD, always knew that she wanted to be a writer. In elementary school, she regularly wrote poetry and by the time she reached high school, she decided she wanted to become a journalist. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, she participated in several journalism internships, ultimately graduating with a bachelor of arts in English literature.
As she was considering an MFA in creative writing, a professor suggested that she pursue a graduate degree in an interdisciplinary field that she had never heard of — performance studies”.
When the Devil Knocks
“The Devils in the Details,” UNC Gazette, March 17, 2015
Renée Alexander Craft has been going to Panama for 14 years, a few weeks at a time. She is fascinated by a small seaside town called Portobelo, its Afro-Latin residents and the special spin they give to their pre-Lenten Carnival. They call their version of Carnival season, “Congo Season.”
“It’s a small town that’s rich in culture and history. It’s a small town that also has been consistently touched by global trade and tourism,” said Alexander Craft. “The history is just so thick and interesting. I’m never at a loss for questions or great people to ask.”
“The Festival of the Black Christ,” WUNC’s The State of Things, October 20, 2011
Every October, tens of thousands of people make a pilgrimage to Portobelo, a quiet fishing town in Panama’s Colon Province, to visit El Cristo Negro – the Black Christ. It’s a life-sized figure of Jesus carved from dark mahogany. That powerful symbol, which has been in Portobelo since the 17th century, represents both the proud spirit and spiritual identity of this unique Central American community. Host Frank Stasio talks about the people of Portobelo, the Black Christ figure and the annual festival that celebrates it with Renee Alexander Craft.
I Will Love You Everywhere Always
“Coping with Grief through Words and Pictures,” UNC Spotlight, February 25, 2013
Through the story of Hope, a little girl who loses her mother to an illness, Alexander Craft helps grieving children understand their feelings and emotions. “One of the things I want people who read this book to come away with is a sense of how to reconnect with the people they love. It’s OK to feel funky and to feel bad. Grief takes time, but here are tools that can help you feel a little better right now. Sharing stories and memories are two such tools,” Alexander Craft says.
“Meet Renee Alexander Craft,” WUNC’s The State of Things, November 12, 2012
In 2008, Renee Alexander Craft lost one of her best friends to breast cancer. Craft says that cancer targets an individual, but when someone has it, that person’s whole community has it. As an act of healing, Craft wrote “I Will Love You Everywhere Always” (2012), to celebrate her friend’s life.
Craft has used writing throughout her life as an act of storytelling and survival. She performs this art in both her home state of North Carolina, as well as her second home, Portobelo, Panama. Host Frank Stasio talks with Renee Alexander Craft, an artist, ethnographer and professor of communications studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about her life and work.
Digital Portobelo
“Digital Portobelo: Connecting Scholarship, Cultural Preservation and Community Engagement in Panama,” Carolina Arts & Sciences Magazine, Fall 2014
“Because this tradition was largely absent from discourses on black cultural performances in the Americas, I was clear the book would make a positive scholarly contribution, but I was also clear that it would not be very useful to the local community,” said Craft, who holds a joint appointment in global studies. “What they really wanted was a type of cultural preservation they could more directly access, but I didn’t know how to do that.” For years, Craft had given copies of photos and tapes to individual community members. Then, a presentation by UNC’s Digital Innovation Lab in spring 2012 began to unlock the possibility of making this wealth of material available to the people of Portobelo and the larger world through digitization.
“Enriching Public Culture: Several developments in the humanities this week are as newsworthy as the Pulitzers — and possibly more consequential in the long run, writes Scott McLemee,” Inside Higher Ed, April 20, 2016
Prestige has its privileges. When a well-established award is announced — as the 100th set of Pulitzer Prize winners was on Tuesday — it tends to consume the available limelight. Anything less monumental tends to disappear into its shadow.
But a couple of developments in the humanities this week strike me as being as newsworthy as the Pulitzers. If anything, they are possibly more consequential in the long run.
For one, we have the Whiting Foundation’s new Public Engagement Fellowship, which named its first recipients on Tuesday. The fellowship ought not to be confused with the Whiting Award, which since 1985 has been given annually to 10 authors “based on early accomplishment and the promise of great work to come.” The winners receive $50,000 each, along with, presumably, the professed esteem and subdued malice of their peers.