This series spotlights arts organizations, collectives, and initiatives with good causes at their core. Keep up the good work.
Taking as its starting point the lunchroom phenomenon of self-segregating, Black Lunch Table is a non-profit oral history archiving project. First staged in 2005, BLT is an ongoing collaboration with artists Heather Hart and Jina Valentine. Their mission is to fill holes in the documentation of contemporary art history.
At their literal and metaphorical lunch tables, culture producers of color engage in critical dialogue on topics that directly affect their communities. BLT’s roundtable sessions provide physical space and allotted time for interdisciplinary intergenerational discussions that bring together a diversity of community members and foster candid conversation. Each roundtable’s dialogue is documented in their online archive. Visitors may search the database of primary source material.
From their website: We sit together because we share common backgrounds, face common challenges, and have a vested interest in our communal well-being. We also gather because there is an expectation of separation, both internally and externally from those excluded from the table, who we perhaps have also felt excluded by. As conspicuously othered people, both founding artists have participated in the black lunch table phenomenon at various times in our lives and self-consciously chose to sit or not to sit with our like-skinned classmates or colleagues. In the art world and in other professional and academic circles, such self-segregating exists in varying degrees of external visibility, and with varying degrees of endorsement from its constituents. The Black Lunch Table, taking the lunchroom phenomenon as its starting point, seeks to reify the visibility of connections and conversations that exist between contemporary artists of color.
In the last three years, more than 600 people have contributed their voices and energy to the Black Lunch Table archive. The organization has hosted 72 Wikipedia events in six different countries, creating 385 new articles and uploading 727 new images. These edit-a-thons mobilize a collective authoring of suggested articles pertaining to the lives and works of black artists.
In 2016, BLT was awarded a Creative Capital grant for social practice. Learn more about Black Lunch Table and the good work that they do.