The Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance in partnership with London Arts and Health, commissioned six artists/practitioners to explore this year's Black History Month theme, ‘Standing Firm in Power and Pride'. This year's theme is a powerful tribute to the resilience, strength, and unwavering commitment to progress that defines the Black community across the globe.
Find out more about each of the artists/practitioners that have been selected to share their audio, visual or text-based interpretations of 'Standing Firm in Power and Pride' within the context of creative health, climate action, planetary health, and community action, below.
Chioma Ince
Image © Chioma Ince
Read Chioma's blog 'Leaders of Resistance' here
Biography:
Chioma Ince is a London based British African and Caribbean Illustrator and Workshop Facilitator whose socially engaged practice centres care, accessibility, and identity. Her work explores themes of identity, mental health, grief, politics, environmental colonialism and community.
Chioma studied at UAL Camberwell (2015–2016) before specialising in Illustration at the Glasgow School of Art (2016–2019), graduating with a BA Hons in Communication Design.
Ince’s experience of facilitating and creating socially engaged work that challenges social constructs, uplifts communities, sparks conversation and engages with all ages has led her to work with: The National Gallery, Amnesty International, Penguin Random House, Climate In Colour, Action For Children, Fairtrade, London Wildlife Trust, Imperial College, Andersen Press, A Space, Iniva, Shado magazine, King's College London, NHS Trust and Shelter Scotland. All these collaborations have derived from a need to promote representation, inclusivity, and accessibility within the arts, while amplifying voices that are often silenced and erased.
Joyce Treasure
Image © Sharon AA Anderson
Bibliography:
Joyce Treasure is a multidisciplinary artist and Independent Researcher highly motivated in the creative industry, delivering and installing shows as a director, project manager, artist, filmmaker, and workshop facilitator. Her work includes engaging with the public in groups and one-on-one settings. Drawing on diverse skills and research, she transcends the boundaries between art and research to create new hybrid work incorporating movement, performance, and new technologies to disseminate theory as a decolonial practice. Transforming assemblages of objects and images into allegories of experiences, she cuts between collage, sculpture, painting, drawings, performance, film, and speculative writing in her practice.
View Joyce's portfolio here
Rapasa Nyatrapasa Otieno
Image © Rapasa Nyatrapasa Otieno
Biography:
Rapasa Nyatrapasa Otieno is a Kenyan producer and multidisciplinary artist encompassing music, storytelling, visual and movement exploring traditional East African culture’s relevance in today's global world. He is an advocate of nyatiti music which is central to his art. The nyatiti is an 8 string lyre from Western Kenya of a nilote community called Luo. In 2022 he founded Nyatiti NyaDala CIC to give his community work a home. In his mothertong Nyatiti NyaDala means “nyatiti from home” which is what the audience in the city would ask for “play us nyatiti the way it is played at home’’. His East African music workshops and performances have met schools, hospitals, orphanages, groups of children and adults who need special attention. As well as using music to empower communities he is harnessing the benefit of making instruments using recycled or sustainably sourced materials.
Read Rapasa's blog here
Keisha Grant
Image © Keisha Grant
Biography:
Keisha was born in Birmingham, UK, to Jamaican parents, she began dance classes at the age of 3 in ballet, tap dance and jazz at her local dancing school because she was shy. She trained at Laban Centre and Roehampton University graduating with a degree in Dance Studies and Art for the Community, Keisha toured internationally as a dancer across Europe, Southern Africa and Canada. Keisha is a qualified yoga instructor with an interest in creativity and trauma healing through movement modality. She founded a Dance company called Keneish Dance and under her leadership, the company won ‘Best Contemporary Dance Company and then the following year in 2024 ‘Most Innovative Dance Company’ from SME Midlands Enterprise awards. Keisha’s work is interdisciplinary, for example her previous work was in collaboration with Centre for Mechanochemical Cell Biology at University of Warwick using the mechanics of immune cells as a source of inspiration. Her work is rooted in emotions and human experience, personal and shared narratives from the diaspora using dance and movement.
Read Keisha's blog here
Amanda Hemmings
Image © Amanda Hemmings
Biography:
For over 15 years Amanda has used the artform of poetry to support the wellbeing of children, young people and adults. In recent years, this journey has led her to collaborate with local NHS Trusts - creating commissioned works that uplift, inform and connect communities. It has encompassed writing and performing poetry that raises awareness of vital NHS services and campaigns; supporting the wellbeing of patients, visitors, staff and the wider public.
Read Amanda's blog 'Lantern Bearers: 'The Voices who Lit my Path' here
Seyi Adelekun
Seyi Adelekun is a London-based multidisciplinary artist of Yoruba-Nigerian heritage. Their practice spans immersive installation, performance and sound, using these mediums as storytelling devices to archive and share ancestral knowledge and ecological wisdom. Approaching art as a form of world-building, Seyi’s work explores the vital role of African spirituality in resisting environmental racism, while drawing on principles of planetary healing to envision and cultivate more restorative realities.
Rooted in ecosomatics, Seyi's ceremonies and community workshops translate these principles into collective practice. Their work celebrates diverse ways of knowing and relating, through ritual, craft, embodied movement and land-based practices, creating sensorial experiences that invite play, connection and the exploration of interdependence.
IG: @seyi_adelekun
E: [email protected]