Patacones, Paint Brushes, and Power:

Historicizing An African Diaspora Arts Collective at the Crossroads of the Americas

Known as “Taller Portobelo,” the Portobelo-based arts cooperative was co-founded by artist and art historian Arturo Lindsay, photographer Sandra Eleta, and painter Yaneka Esquina. Lindsay went on to create the Spelman College Portobelo, Panama Summer Artist Retreat, a three-week immersive experience that gave students at his home-institution as well as burgeoning and established US-based artists the opportunity to learn from and collaborate with Taller Portobelo artists. Two alumni of the program, writer and artists administrator Oronike Odeleye and entrepreneur Nahlyée Van Brunt, built upon the model by creating an Atlanta-based sister organization called “Taller Portobelo Norte” (later re-branded as “Creative Currents Arts Collective”), which created additional Portobelo-immersive opportunities for US-and Panama-based artists to collaborate, share exhibitions, and engage in critical dialogues about Black Diaspora arts and cultures.

Whereas my first two research projects focus the ways Portobelo-based history and cultural traditions contribute to the cultural identity of the town and nation, “Patacones, Paint Brushes, and Power” analyzes the town’s impact on a generation of African American and Afro-Latin visual artists and creative writers who participated in summer artist retreats there between 1995-2015. These internationally renowned artists and creative writers include, among others: Amy Sherald, Torkwase Dyson, Fahamu Pecou, Ashley Minner, Robert Pruitt,  Jaki Shelton Green, and Howard Craft. Each of these artists center Black aesthetics and cultural politics within their work, and their contemporary success benefits from relationships, collaborations, and conversations that routed through Taller Portobelo.

Like my broader research, this project contends with how twentieth- and twenty-first century African-descended communities use artistry embodied in a range of cultural performance traditions to build community; map their differential trajectories of “Blackness;” maintain sophisticated repertoires of knowledge; and use the power of creativity, ingenuity, and imagination to do the work of social justice. This research contributes to the fields of communication, performance studies, cultural studies, art history, global studies, African American and African Diaspora studies, American studies, Latin American studies, and Caribbean studies.

The Dukes and Duchesses of Black Charlotte
An Oral History Monograph and Digital Humanities Project

My next major research and creative project brings my interest in Hemispheric Blackness back to my “homeplace” of Charlotte, NC through an ethnographic and oral history-based study focused on African American men’s social club called “The Dukes Club.” Built on the principles of self-determination and cooperative economics, The Dukes Club afforded its members the ability to fellowship, travel, and exercise community through an independent, secular organization as well as construct a freestanding building that they owned, occupied, and managed. Almost sixty years later, the organization remains an active institution, and my father is one of two of its oldest remaining members. Known as “Dukes,” the male members as well as their spouses, referred to as “Duchesses,” represent a wealth of knowledge on mid-to-late twentieth century Black Charlotte from the perspective of those who witnessed its transition from segregation to integration. Using the club as its anchor, this project will focus on the mainstream and underground economies that this particular Black southern community used to create sustainable working- and middle-class lives in the midst of Jim Crow segregation as well as their experiential knowledge of the city’s transformation from textile industries to banking over the last half century. It will also examine how autonomous organizations, like The Dukes Club, created valuable local spaces for Black secular sociality during a time in which segregation limited southern Blacks’ collective leisure activities to the church, school, nightclub, or neighborhood. The Duke’s Club is a unique vehicle through which to examine mid-to-late twentieth century Black sociopolitical and economic experiences in Charlotte because its members all were raised in the city and have remained there throughout their lifetimes. Born between the late 1920s and 1940s, its members span two generations, live in predominately Black neighborhoods throughout the city, and are retirees from industries as varied as truck driving and house painting to banking and education.