ZEAL is a worker owned creative arts studio alliance where we cultivate emergent creative community development strategies to cooperatively own and steward the means of our cultural production. Through our creative talent development, social impact studio practice, and creative placemaking we celebrate our lineages, assert our voices, archive our legacy, and showcase our artistic talents toward building community wealth across the Black diaspora.
Cultural
Design+Strategy
We collaborate with arts and culture organizations, brands, networks, and platforms to ideate, plan, develop and implement cooperative mindsets, frameworks, and practices through a creative value chain from production to preservation. This happens through creative project management, cultural production, resource mobilization and fundraising technical assistance to sustain these efforts operationally. Using multimedia story and narrative-based approaches, we apply design and networked system thinking principles to transform our relationships with branding and marketing processes away from scarcity and to sufficiency, aiming to achieve your desired social impact.
Communities of Practice:
Creative Economy
We co-create and host communities of practice. Our focus is on preparing our partners to operate creative businesses and organizations within a solidarity economy. We guide businesses and organizations through our creative placemaking practice, supporting our partners in understanding how to define value in places and their contribution to it through art and various forms of media. This is achieved by providing support in creative value business models, offering leadership development, and promoting workplace wellness. We pay special attention to multi-sector subject matter experiences within the creative industry.
The Remedy is Solidarity
This multimedia anthology comprises of volumes that gives a background story on the location and/or issue where reparations processes are being deliberated that take on structural approaches to remedies inclusive of, and not exclusive to cash payments. As part of a cultural strategy, the volumes will be catalyzed through exhibitions, audio/visual testimonies, artwork, zines, and curated music and sounds and captured with a community archival process.
Creative-led Community Development Initiative - Metro Los Angeles (Inglewood)
ZEAL received a pre-development grant of $150,000 from Kataly Foundation 2022-2023 for Phase 1 of our work to assess opportunities in South LA to build reparative community wealth initiatives through Black arts and culture ecosystems which led ZEAL principal members to provide sub-grants via our fiscal sponsor Allied Media Projects to the following Black arts and culture organizations in the area:
Residency Art Gallery : $15,000 in addition to subsidized rental support with their gallery, capacity building towards scaling up their business, and relocating their space to Hollywood Park while maintain their former space in Downtown Inglewood for experimentation and storage of visual art works.
SOLA Contemporary: $15,000 to support adapting their model after being displaced from their gallery on Slauson in the Hyde Park neighborhood bordering Inglewood. Currently they are partnering with Hilltop Cafe locations to display Black artists’ works.
ITS-IN-SCOPE: $10,000 to experiment with their art merchandise, commerce, community archival, and showroom concepts that create a collaborative revenue generating model based on cooperative principles.
Stay tuned for updates on our next phase of work!
“Who Owns Black Art” Our Art Basel Miami Activation
A large scale pop-up art exhibition, cultural convening, and cultural equity & strategy hub marking the 400th year commemoration of the TransAtlantic Slave Trade and the 12th month of the Year of Return declared by the Ghanaian government.
Who Owns Black Art? has been taking place in Little Haiti since 2019, where culture, history and legacy of Black liberation is facing down gentrification through at the hands of artists and culture makers. Our flagship cultural production work in Miami has been featured in the New York Times, ArtNet News, TravelNoire, Blavity, Hyperallergic, Paper Magazine, ABC Nightline, and Deem Journal.
2019 was hosted at the Miami Urban Contemporary Experience; 2020 we held an online art auction in partnership with Sugarcane Magazine, and 2022 we partnered with The Roots Collective Black House, founded by the late Danny Agnew; cultural ambassadors of arts in heritage Miami neighborhoods.
