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This fall Wa Na Wari is taking art to the streets for our 2021 Fall Fundraising Event.
We are creating our own one-day art walk in the Central District, and it's called “Walk the Block.” “Walk the Block” transforms homes, businesses, parks, and other neighborhood spaces into outdoor, street-viewable art installations and performance sites. Enjoy visual art, video installations, live music, dance, and more as you stroll the neighborhood with family and friends. Walk the talk when you walk the block by helping to raise funds and build community with Wa Na Wari. All participants are required to wear a mask at the event. Participants can arrive and begin the walk anytime between 3pm and 5pm. This will allow participants to stay socially distanced throughout the walk. Dress for inclement weather and wear comfortable shoes. |
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Participating Artists:
Barbara Earl Thomas, Sable Elyse Smith, Martine Syms, Marita Dingus, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Owour Arunga, Nia Amina Minor and friends, Kimisha Turner, Northwest Tap Connection, Zahyr Lauren, Chloe King, Black Embodiments Studio, Jazz Brown, Gary Hammon and friends, DJ Riz, Larry Mizell Jr, Shelf LIfe Community Story Project and Vis-a-Vis Society.
Featuring Food and Drinks By:
Tarik Abdullah, Mama Sambusa Kitchen, Central Cafe, and Erudite & Stone.
Barbara Earl Thomas, Sable Elyse Smith, Martine Syms, Marita Dingus, Lisa Myers Bulmash, Owour Arunga, Nia Amina Minor and friends, Kimisha Turner, Northwest Tap Connection, Zahyr Lauren, Chloe King, Black Embodiments Studio, Jazz Brown, Gary Hammon and friends, DJ Riz, Larry Mizell Jr, Shelf LIfe Community Story Project and Vis-a-Vis Society.
Featuring Food and Drinks By:
Tarik Abdullah, Mama Sambusa Kitchen, Central Cafe, and Erudite & Stone.
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Don't Wait to Buy Your Tickets! 1) Ticket sales that include food, drink, and/or artist-designed umbrella, close on the night of October 8th! 2) It's a fundraiser! Your ticket purchase helps us toward our fundraising goal for 2022 programming at Wa Na Wari. |
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What can I expect from the Walk the Block Experience?
Participants will wander the neighborhood and discover Black art on porches, in gardens, in the windows and yards of Black-owned homes and Black businesses, and even in traffic circles and on umbrellas! |
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Gary Hammon Band
Gary Hammon and friends will play original compositions on the porch of a Black-owned home.
Born and raised in Seattle, Gary “Jubil” Hammon began his study of the saxophone while a junior at Garfield High School. Awarded a scholarship, he began attending the New England Conservatory of Music, in 1969, the first year Black students were accepted.
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Gary went on to establish himself on the jazz scene in Boston and New York, which led to working and touring with blues greats Albert King and Albert Collins, a long stint with Big Jim Patton’s band, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and further jazz work with Barbara Donald and Grant Green. This footage was shot by Inye Wokoma when the Gary Hammon band performed at Wa Na Wari. http://www.garyhammonmusic.com/
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Barbara earl thomas
Sneak Peek of the work Barbara Earl Thomas will have on display, outdoors at Wa Na Wari, during Walk The Block.
Barbara Earl Thomas is a Seattle-based award-winning writer and visual artist with a career that spans more than 30 years. Her far-ranging exhibits include The Savannah Contemporary Art Museum and the Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums with solo exhibits at the Meadows Museum in Shreveport, Louisiana and the Evansville Museum of Art and Technology in Indiana. Her works, widely collected, are included in the Portland, Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums and private and corporate collections such as Microsoft, 21c Museum Hotel (Louisville, KY) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
In 2013 Thomas received the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award and in 2016, the Washington State Governor’s Arts award, the Artist Trust, Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award and the Seattle Stranger Genius Award for excellence in the arts. She was also nationally noted for her exhibition “Heaven On Fire,” a major career survey with The Bainbridge Island Art Museum.
As the daughter of Southerners who came to the Northwest in the 1940s, she is among the first generation in her family born outside of Texas and Louisiana. She credits her southern heritage for her penchant for storytelling and humor. From her mother, Lula Mae, she inherited her love of reading. From her father, Grady, she learned that the truth is better than a lie because human beings are not smart enough to keep multiple story lines untangled. She is a reader and writer who has also published essays on travel, nature and contemporary arts and culture. Also, to her credit are monographs on artists such as Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Joe Fedderson, Cappy Thompson, Alan Rohan Crite and Julie Speidel.
In 2013 Thomas received the Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award and in 2016, the Washington State Governor’s Arts award, the Artist Trust, Irving and Yvonne Twining Humber Award and the Seattle Stranger Genius Award for excellence in the arts. She was also nationally noted for her exhibition “Heaven On Fire,” a major career survey with The Bainbridge Island Art Museum.
As the daughter of Southerners who came to the Northwest in the 1940s, she is among the first generation in her family born outside of Texas and Louisiana. She credits her southern heritage for her penchant for storytelling and humor. From her mother, Lula Mae, she inherited her love of reading. From her father, Grady, she learned that the truth is better than a lie because human beings are not smart enough to keep multiple story lines untangled. She is a reader and writer who has also published essays on travel, nature and contemporary arts and culture. Also, to her credit are monographs on artists such as Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Joe Fedderson, Cappy Thompson, Alan Rohan Crite and Julie Speidel.
Marita dingus
See an installation of Marita Dingus' visual art in the courtyard at Coyote Central.
Artist Statement: I consider myself an African-American Feminist and environmental artist. As a child my father would bring his discarded engineering paper home from work so I could use the backsides for drawing paper. In a 1982 visit to a beach in Morocco, a nearby garbage dump with “rats as big as cats” caught my eye, leaving a deep emotional imprint about the vast waste humans produce... |
I’ve also come to the viewpoint that people of African descent were “used” during the institution of slavery and then callously discarded. So, I make art out of discarded materials to express an empowering missive. The goal of my art remains to show how people not only survive but prosper under dire circumstances. From the foundation of my Afro-centricity I shape my art and garments, using repurposed fabric, leather, plastic, and other found objects to create eclectic and inspiring pieces to convey a powerful message about the sustainability of the human spirit.
http://maritadingus.com |
Owuor Arunga
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Follow the sounds of Owuor Arunga on trumpet to Garfield Community Center
Owuor Arunga is a jazz trumpeter. He was born in Kisumu in Kenya and moved to New York in the early 2000s, where he studied in The New School’s Jazz & Contemporary Music Program. From his origin as a member of the Garfield High School Jazz Band, Owuor has since played around the United States and toured around the world, including Canada, Europe and South Africa. Some of the artist he has played or apprenticed with include Charlie Persip, Candido Camero, Billy Bang, The Cadillacs, Robert Glasper, Louis Reyes Rivera, Olu Dara, Jimmy Owens, and Chico Freeman. Arunga has also played with Seattle hip hop acts including Macklemore (The Heist), The Physics, and Black Stax. This footage was shot by Inye Wokoma during Wa Na Wari’s Ballot Box Boogie Parade. https://www.instagram.com/owuorarunga/ |
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Bring Us collective
See Bring Us Collective outside Garfield Community Center.
‘Bring Us’, shines a light on Seattle-based performers from across our community during Wa Na Wari's Walk the Block fundraiser. Through pop up performances, join us as we come together around artists that Bring Us Community, Bring Us Together, and Bring us Joy.
Featuring Choreography + Performances by:
Amanda Morgan, Akoiya Harris, Bonnet Black, dani tirrell, marco farroni
Nia-Amina Minor, Niyafath Cakpo, Robbi A Moore, Taqueet$
‘Bring Us’, shines a light on Seattle-based performers from across our community during Wa Na Wari's Walk the Block fundraiser. Through pop up performances, join us as we come together around artists that Bring Us Community, Bring Us Together, and Bring us Joy.
Featuring Choreography + Performances by:
Amanda Morgan, Akoiya Harris, Bonnet Black, dani tirrell, marco farroni
Nia-Amina Minor, Niyafath Cakpo, Robbi A Moore, Taqueet$
NW Tap Connection
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NW Tap Connection will perform outside Garfield Community Center.
Northwest Tap Connection is a race and social justice oriented dance studio. Our mission is inclusive of providing quality dance and job opportunities to under-served communities, and also to raise a generation of socially conscious artists who produce works that fosters change. |
Our philosophy is that dance enriches the lives of the students while also helping to develop self-discipline, instill self-confidence, and encourage achievement.
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Kimisha turner
Washington born and raised interdisciplinary artist, Kimisha Turner, enjoys working in varying mediums & processes to execute her conceptual vision. She creates murals, art camps/workshops, sculptures, and performance art, connecting with her community while reflecting the times. Typically, there is a familiar thread of layers and beauty combined with challenging subject matter in her work, with the hope that it is provocative yet easily digested by a varied audience. Bright colors and semi-precious materials are often used to grab attention and draw in the viewer. Growing up as a Black woman in the Pacific Northwest, losing both parents by her early 30’s and being a mother to beautiful boy on the spectrum, her layered life experience heavily influences her artistic curiosity. Her work aims to help generate new perspectives and encourage empathy, pushing to have the viewer walk in another’s shoes while exploring ways that allow one to relate to another. She earned her B.F.A. from Cornish College of the Arts with an emphasis in Photography and Printmaking and has since focused on innovative ways of creating and interpreting the human journey. The Seattle Art Museum, Pratt Fine Arts and Seattle Theater Group are a few of the organizations to collaborate with Kimisha. While she isn’t making work, she is raising her amazing flipbook making son, Malcolm.
Dj Riz and Larry Mizell Jr
Dance it out to DJs Riz Rollins and Larry Mizell Jr
Martine syms
See Martine Syms' video art "Notes On Gesture," at 2320 E Columbia Street.
Martine Syms works across visual and print media, incorporating images from personal and popular culture to explore the ways in which language, gesture and image form conceptions of identity. Her recent feature-length film Incense, Sweaters & Ice follows two Black women navigating routes of the Great Migration. Syms’ work has been exhibited and screened widely, including presentations at MoMA PS1, ICA London, The Studio Museum in Harlem, MCA Chicago, the Hammer Museum, and recent exhibitions at Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York, and Sadie Coles HQ, London. She is the founder of Dominica Publishing, a small imprint dedicated to exploring Blackness as a topic, reference, marker and audience in visual culture. https://martinesy.ms/ |
Sable elyse smith
See Sable Elyse Smith's video art "End-LESSsestina," at Melo Cafe on 25th and Union.
Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York and Richmond Virginia. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible. Her work has been featured at MoMA Ps1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, JTT, Rachel Uffner Gallery, and Recess Assembly, New York; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Artist Television Access, San Francisco, CA; Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, London. |
Lisa myers bulmash
See Lisa Myers Bulmash's work Travelling Community at nanoforest, on 25th Avenue, when you Walk The Block.
Bulmash is a collage and book artist who works primarily in acrylics, paper and found objects. Informally trained, Myers Bulmash began her career making handmade cards. After her father’s death in 2006, the artist felt compelled to take more personal risks in her creative life. Questions of identity, trust and the imperfect memory now drive most of her work. The artist aims to nudge the viewer into recognizing our shared stories, especially those narratives that are usually experienced in isolation. |
Collage work by Myers Bulmash resides in two city art collections: Shoreline and Seattle. The latter includes art by Barbara Earl Thomas, Dale Chihuly and Kara Walker. She is also the winner of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, an award to support artists with children under age 18. The artist’s work and commentary have been highlighted in five books as well. Myers Bulmash exhibits her work in group and solo shows throughout the Seattle metro area. On the East Coast, she is represented by Morton Fine Art Gallery.
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chloe king
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See Chloe King's work, "Looking at Me Looking At You," at the Spring Street P-Patch.
For this piece I wanted to further explore the multiplicity of perception and perspective. Mylar becomes faulty camouflage and pattern becomes the most tangible object available to the viewer to further unpack notions of strategic visibility. Chloe King (b.1999, lives and works in Seattle) is a multidisciplinary artist who works in between painting and photography. King’s work is born from her experience as a mixed-race queer womxn from a small, predominantly white town and explores notions of identity, power, and perception through vibrant and chaotic textiles, plants, and paper covered self portraiture. King received her BFA degree in Spring 2021 from Cornish College of the Arts, and has held residencies at ARTS at King Street Station, (2021), Specialist Gallery (2020), and Chautauqua School of Art (2020). King has also participated in a number of shows including CVA School of Art Student & Emerging Artists Exhibition, Chautauqua, NY (2020), For The Love Of Art, 9th Ave Gallery at Cornish College of the Arts (2019), Bogus Blooms at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle WA (2019), Close to Home at Joe Bar in Seattle, WA (2019), Painted Psyche at Endless Knot in Seattle, WA (2019), Living Target at Clark College Student Center in Vancouver WA, and Art Student Annual at Archer Gallery, Vancouver WA (2018).
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INYe wokoma
Photo by James Harnois
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Inye Wokoma will share the collage diptych C.R.E.A.M M.O.V.E at Walk the Block.
Inye's family has lived in the Central District since the 1940s. As a journalist, filmmaker and visual artist, he explores themes of identity, community, history, land, politics and power through the lens of personal and visual narratives. His work is informed by a deep social practice that prioritizes the utility of his art to the collective welfare of his community. Three of his most recent projects, A Central Vision, An Elegant Utility, and This Is Who We Are, represent prismatic explorations of the history, current experience, and future of Seattle’s African American Community. Inye completed a degree in journalism and filmmaking from Clark Atlanta University before establishing Ijo Arts Media Group in Seattle. His work as a photojournalist has appeared in USA Today, ColorsNW, Washington Law and Politics, and Chicago Wilderness, among others. In 2004 and 2006 respectively, he received two awards for editorial photography from the Society of Professional Journalists Western Washington Chapter, for coverage of the communities of color in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. His collaboration with journalist Silja Talvi on Washington State’s three strikes law won a 2004 National Council on Crime and Delinquency PASS Award for criminal justice reportage. These journalism awards were earned while shooting for ColorsNW Magazine under the editorial guidance of Naomi Ishisaka. His film Lost & (Puget) Sound, received a 2012 Telly Award and won Best Film for Youth at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival. In 2017, he participated in the visual arts group show Borderlands, which went on to receive an Americans for the Arts 2018 Public Art Network Year in Review Award, for its collective exploration of national identity, immigration, and belonging. |
Artbrellas
When you purchase tickets at the Art Explosion level, you can walk the block with an artbrella featuring work by artists Zahyr Lauren and Jazz Brown.
Be the "shine" in "rain or shine," and walk the talk while walking the block, by showing your support for Black art.
Be the "shine" in "rain or shine," and walk the talk while walking the block, by showing your support for Black art.
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Zahyr Lauren, otherwise known as The Artist L.Haz, creates for love of their community. The Artist is an autodidact who credits the power of their work to the strength and brilliance running through the blood of Black people. A strength and brilliance passed down from the ancestors
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Jazz Brown is an autodidact who uses acrylic paint to create vivid, expressive compositions. His artistic approach presents intense vibration through contrasting hues, shapes, and textures. Brown describes his technique as "consciousnesses on canvas."
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The 3rd thing press and kamari Bright
Presenting a sneak preview of Wa Na Wari's new book, Joy Has a Sound: Black Sonic Visions
The 3rd Thing is an independent press dedicated to publishing necessary alternatives. Every year or so we publish a cohort of projects representing in form, content and perspective our interdisciplinary, intersectional priorities. We think of each project in the cohort as a break in the stockade—a way out of the settlement and into the wilderness. We publish work primarily by artists and writers who identify as members of traditionally marginalized groups, primarily Indigenous people, womxn, queer people and people of color. The press is operated by a small, entirely volunteer staff. Publisher/Editor: Anne de Marcken
Pollinator: Alison Bailey Intern: M Freeman Founding members of the press include Sarah Tavis and Grey. Sarah continues to lend insight and support to operations. |
Photo by Graeme Aegerter
Driven by the desire to chronicle history-in-the-making through the innovative use of text and visuals, the work produced by Kamari Bright aims to inspire all creative souls, from young to seasoned. She often pulls inspiration from introspection and observation; examining history, current events, and her own growth journey to inspire her next creations. The St. Louis-born creative has had poetry featured in “NILVX: A Book of Magic,” “2018 Jack Straw Writers Anthology,” “Moss,” and Bellwether Arts Week. Her videopoems have been awarded at the Tacoma Film Festival, Seattle Black Film Festival, and the Film & Videopoetry Symposium; and have screened widely in festivals from the United States to Germany.
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Food and Drink
Mama Sambusa Kitchen will offer beef, chicken, salmon, and vegetarian sambusas for you to snack on while you walk.
Mama Sambusa Kitchen is a woman-owned, Black Muslim business. For years they have been providing the community with delicious fresh food that showcases their culture. They are known for their sambusa, "the only love triangle you'd want to be apart of." 
Photo credit: Syd Sutha
Erudite and Stone (@drink_science) will offer craft beverages (alcoholic and non-alcoholic) outdoors at Wa Na Wari!
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Chef Tarik Abdullah will Feed the People at Coyote Central
Meat Option: Garam masala lamb Sloppy Joes, with collard green pesto, and spicy pickled red onions, on bread from Q Bakery Vegan option: Jackfruit Sloppy Joes, with collard green pesto, and spicy pickled red onions, on bread from Q Bakery. The pesto contains cashews but is vegan. Gluten free bread option available. 
Grab hot cocoa (boozy or non-alcoholic) at Central Cafe!
Central Cafe & Juice Bar is a Black-owned, eco-conscious cafe offering espresso coffees, fresh pressed juice lattes, smoothies, and teas alongside pastries and deli items. They are committed to urbanism and the historic preservation of their building. |
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Ticket Packages: (ticket sales for tickets that include food, drink, and/or artbrellas close on the night of October 8th)
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FAQ: When is Walk the Block? Saturday, October 16th from 3pm-6pm. Participants can arrive and begin the walk anytime between 3pm and 5pm. Where does the event start? Wa Na Wari is located at 911 24th Ave, in the Central District. We are within walking distance of the #2, #48, #3, and #4 buses. What is the deadline for purchasing tickets? You can purchase tickets up to the day of. For tickets that include food, drink, and/or artbrellas, the deadline is the night of October 3rd. Can I get a refund because of the weather, COVID, or my plans have changed? We're very sorry but all registrations are final. This event will go on rain or shine. If you can no longer attend your registration can be a donation. Please contact us for a tax receipt if you can't attend. Is Walk the Block COVID-safe? All participants are required to wear a mask at the event. The entire event takes place outdoors. Participants can arrive and begin the walk anytime between 3pm and 5pm. This will allow everyone to stay socially distanced throughout the walk. How do I get my swag (Race Bib, Map, Drink & Food Tickets, and Umbrella?) Everyone will start the walk at Wa Na Wari, 911 24th Ave, Seattle, WA, 98122. That is where you will get your map, racing bib, drink and food tickets and other swag. How far is the walk? What if I get tired or need to use the bathroom? The total distance of the walk is about .8 miles. You can walk, ride a bike, or drive. Rest and bathroom spots will be located on the event map. |