Performing Arts
#BlackTrust: The Future is Collective: Radical Relationships in the Afro Future
About Charles Wallace-Thomas IV:
Charles is a third-year student at Northeastern University studying Economics and Mathematics with a minor in Psychology. At Northeastern, Charles is the Director of Northeastern Students Against Institutional Discrimination (SAID), a coalition of student activists confronting institutional marginalization by empowering students to become better organizers through political education and direct action.
As a Philanthropic Strategy Advisor for The Columbus Foundation, Charles helps to align funding with the needs of the city’s most marginalized communities. He also co-led the Northside Vitality Project at New Rules Benefit Corporation, studying North Minneapolis’ economic ecology and residents’ sense of economic agency and self-determination and has worked as a research assistant at the Center for Economic Democracy.
Charles currently serves as the Fund Associate with the Boston Ujima Project which works to create new community-controlled economy in Greater Boston. As the Ujima Fund Associate, he helps manage investor relations and communications, supports investment research, and assists with community outreach initiatives.
About bashezo and Kamaria Weems:
Situated within frameworks of critical race, queer theory, and Afro-diasporic ancestral reverence, bashezo’s work attempts to unsettle the power, privilege, and aesthetic ethos assumed by members of dominant cultures. Performative installations examine complex realities of racialized, gendered, socio-economic, and sexual orientation oppression as well as recognize methods of resilience used to negotiate these hostile territories. As a result, the imaginings of a third space emerges where the lived experiences of queer brown and black bodies (past, present, and future) are centralized and creative forms of expression are not only consciously utilized as tools of resistance and liberation but also as sites of celebration and joy.
Kamaria Weems is a growing politicized healing practitioner and movement creative. Kamaria believes our bodies carry the wisdom they need to guide personal and collective healing processes as well as a deep resource for creative expression and liberation. In 2017, they co-founded Cultivate: Queer Healing Lab, a QTBIPoC-centered healing justice space and experimental embodiment practice lab based in the Boston with janhavi madabushi. Cultivate received Fenway Health Center’s Judy Bradford Award and Grant in 2018. Also that year, Kamaria was invited to join the UnBound Bodies Collective, a QTBIPoC performance art and community building project. UnBound Bodies is one of the Boston Foundations’s 2019 Live Arts Boston awardees. As a Black, queer, non-binary creative space maker, they have have contributed to their communities through practices of building popular education, program development, and accountable organizational processes. Kamaria also works in the role of Program Coordinator for Public Art Programs at the New England Foundation for the Arts developing grant opportunity programs for creatives and cultural producers. Why Black Trust?
“We are in the midst of a paradigm shift, a reclamation of power in every aspect of our lives. We plan to see our agenda through. Cooperative economics, solidarity economy, economic democracy will become household terms. Relationships will not be transactional or zero sum. Relationships will be organized around and incentivized by mutual benefit and health. We will trust each other. Black Trust.” – Nia Evans, Director of Ujima (2017)
