06/21/2021
from Black Women Radicals: "Let us continue in our ancestors’ footsteps and legacies and invent, imagine, and create the power our freedom, liberation, and a new world requires."
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is a project, exhibition, and suite of programs that celebrate the best of Detroit in the personage of two dynamic women and creative entrepreneurs.
Historically, Detroit’s Black creative talent could find very few places for their work to be seen. They were either compelled to leave the city or too often relegated to the margins. So, Black entrepreneurs, usually creatives themselves, chose to make space. As Josephine Harreld-Love, artist and founder, once said, she would “be the bridge” for young artists and young people of color to access the fine and performing arts.
“To Whom Much Is Given”, the exhibition, will consider the lives and histories of two trailblazers --Josephine Love, founder of Your Heritage House Fine Arts Center for Young People and Dell Pryor, proprietor of Dell Pryor Gallery, a contemporary art space -- who crushed racial, gender and age barriers with the power of their unrelenting excellence and created opportunities for others that would color and frame Detroit’s artistic and arts institutional landscape.
The centerpiece of the project, a mixed-media exhibition, will chronicle a - combined - century of work using their personal collections, archives, and commissioned contemporary literary, film, and figurative works from various artists.
Beyond the exhibition, several programs will also be featured, including a youth arts and education summer initiative and more. Mrs. Love and Pryor’s canvases were a community onto
which they would paint their intentions for a more dynamic and inclusive arts ecosystem, ultimately, bringing it into fruition.
One born, one transplant; Dell Pryor and Josephine Love
contributed — in ways both small and grand — to shifting the current of the arts in Detroit and were institutional prototypes for the Midtown we know and experience, today. We intend to
amplify that legacy and to move it forward with this project.
Beyond chronicling these incredible arts stories, Pryor and Love provide hope-- in a time when equity in the Detroit arts economy is a frequent question, and more, when the capacity for the arts and artists to survive this extraordinary economic time looms over us all. They prove that it is never too late to pursue one's dreams and, in turn, provide a launching pad for the dreams of others.
No matter how uncertain, no matter how unlikely, your destiny is yours. Our future is ours if we believe. Art gives wings to the imagination and in this moment, Detroiters deserve and need to soar. ✨✨✨
Happy ! ✨Today and everyday, we celebrate the fortitude, beauty, culture, and pride of our ancestors. We celebrate their self-determination, collectivism, and resistance.
We reflect on how our ancestors invented the power their freedom required, just as June Jordan so eloquently noted:
“Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.” — June Jordan
Let us continue in our ancestors’ footsteps and legacies and invent, imagine, and create the power our freedom, liberation, and a new world requires.
📸: Portrait of June Jordan seated in front of a bookcase. June Jordan Papers. Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
