Nyarah Carter-Leary

Seminar: Racial Justice

Studio: Visual Arts

Artist Statement

Throughout many of the powerful and memorable articles and interview stories I heard over my working experience in my racial justice

seminar group is how many black African Americans feel that they don’t get treated as well like white Americans do when it comes to having

medical care. Another evocative story that I heard was how most black people don’t get as much access to be able to invest into things that they want

which was very overwhelming and frustrating. This was because if an African American wants to investor in their community they should have

every right to. Out of all the stories I've heard I would say that Antonio Ennis and his (City Life) organization was a very powerful even though it

wasn’t an organization that focused on racial justice but it gave me a piece of knowledge that I never knew and he taught me and my seminar group

how people over the world are getting evicted outta their homes because of having 4 cloger and for the landlords wanting to raise the rent more. This

is so powerful to me because as we worked more and more on it I saw this was a serious issues and that more people should know about the ( City

Life) organization.

The seminar that I joined was focused on racial justice. This topic was interesting to me because I always knew what racial justice was but

never got the deeper meaning of how it takes part in our community. Based on all the research I did working on racial justice I found out that many

African Americans feel that they are getting treated differently when it comes to having medical care. Another issue that I researched about was how

the wealth gap between a white person and a black person is very bad but even worse for the latinx community. Through learning about these

situations I now see why racial justice is a very serious topic in the world now.

I feel that my most important learning and also wondering from the fieldwork and interviews that I was talking to Antonio Ennis about

working his organization call (City Life). When me and my racial justice group visited he talk to us about how the banks are taking our community’s

money and how they evicting people out of their houses. This was a very good learning experience to me because I never heard of what 4 cloger was

or how it could take us out of our homes.

​For my piece my initial version was to create a dreamcatcher that represented something that had do with racial justice in the center of it.

Throughout my time in studio nothing really changed in my vision the only thing that I switched is that instead of putting a picture in the center that

had racial justice involved I put a black hand and white hand fist pumping each other with good quotes on the side of them. I feel that the purpose of

my piece is to capture racial equality and make it a dream because there is still some racist negativity in our world. A message that I wanted to

communicate is for everyone no matter what color, ethnicity and religion you are we have the right to come together. My learning from seminar

influenced the purpose of my piece by giving me all the knowledge to corporate my learning in my work.

The media that I chose to do is visual arts and the form is 3D art. I felt that I should do 3D art is because I noticed that many of my group

members were doing either paintings or collages so I wanted to do something that would stands out so I picked 3D and knew I could corporate a lot

of my learning into it. One artistic challenge I encountered during completing my project was noticing all the time that I had was wasting because I

had to wrap the pigment string around the wooden circle I used for the base of my project. Some of the artistic and creative decisions I made were to

have the black and white hands to have a floating/3D affect and not make it look like a regular dream catcher. I did this because I wanted it to be seen

in a different way than any other dreamcatcher would. When visiting artist and seeing their work in my seminar group it influence mine be seeing all

their creativity.

What I've learned about myself as an artist and as an activist is that I’m capable on doing something creative when keeping my mind to it

once I imagine it. I feel that I've challenged and grown as a result of my work during the capstone experience by being brave and asking people me

and my group had interview life questions on actavis fighting racism and being able to soak good knowledge of what unfairness is when it comes to

racism.