Minne Atairu
Minne Atairu is an artist and doctoral student in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research and practice emerge at the intersection of machine learning, Art/Museum education and Black culture. Minne’s ongoing project, Igun AI, addresses a 17-year artistic absence during the interregnum following the 1897 British punitive expedition in Benin Kingdom. Minne is currently a metaLAB Affiliate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.
Eric Von Haynes
Eric Von Haynes is conceptual artist and printmaker who founded Flatlands Press in Chicago in 2007, focused on producing publications and other printed ephemera for artists worldwide. Flatlands aims to be a community-minded space for artists to create, inspire and share ideas. One of the core tenets at Flatlands Press is community building and making the invisible visible.
Taylor Johnson
Taylor Johnson is an artist from Washington, DC. His first book of poetry, Inheritance, was published in 2020 with Alice James Books.
Sylvia Jones
Sylvia Jones is a writer, educator, and prison abolitionist. She earned her MFA from American University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Scalawag, Ponder Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her debut poetry collection, Buzzard. She lives in Baltimore with her partner and their cat. This upcoming fall she will serve as a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.
Belise Nishimwe
Belise Nishimwe, a 2019 Poetry Out Loud Oregon Champion, and Pamplin Media Group Amazing Kids Award Recipient is a poet, scholar, activist, and visionary. She was born and lived in a refugee camp in Tanzania until the age of five when she and her family moved to America through Catholic Charities. Now a U.S. citizen, she has dedicated herself to creating a platform that gives a voice to marginalized people and the representation they need.
Since regaining her love for creative writing and poetry two years ago, she has won a Scholastic Arts and Writing Gold Key and Silver Medal award, been selected for publication in Duke University Press, featured in a Disney Christmas Holiday Special, and a grantee by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council. She has also been featured on ABC, KATU, KOIN, KGW, The Governor’s Office, Catholic Sentinel, Portland Tribune, Pamplin Media, and Oregon Live.
A recent graduate of St. Mary’s Academy, she will be attending Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) on a full-ride, as a distinguished John B. Ervin Scholar.
Since regaining her love for creative writing and poetry two years ago, she has won a Scholastic Arts and Writing Gold Key and Silver Medal award, been selected for publication in Duke University Press, featured in a Disney Christmas Holiday Special, and a grantee by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council. She has also been featured on ABC, KATU, KOIN, KGW, The Governor’s Office, Catholic Sentinel, Portland Tribune, Pamplin Media, and Oregon Live.
A recent graduate of St. Mary’s Academy, she will be attending Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) on a full-ride, as a distinguished John B. Ervin Scholar.
elizabeth pérez
I do a lot of things but the work I am most proud of is mothering my son. My professional career spans industries and has always centered families, and Black and Brown communities. I have just completed a Master's degree at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) program where I've updated my emergency preparedness kit as an artist and educator. At the moment, I work with DOTDOT studio as a producer and this coming fall I'll be thinking of all the ways to build products and services we actually need with equity at the forefront as a Resident at ITP. On days I have childcare and time on my hands, I make ceramics.
Blair Ebony Smith
Blair loves to rigorously play and make Black girl sounds, spaces, lands, planets, and galaxies with Black girls and those who love them. Her artist-scholar-curator-teacher dreams and praxis emerge where Black girlhood as a creative and relation building life force with Black girls/women, Black feminist poetics, sound, and alternative modes of cultural work and production meet. Her work has explored poetics and sound as practiced with Black girls and collective Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a space/way envisioned by Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006 to celebrateBlack girlhood/Black girls and make our world anew, locally and galaxy-wide. Blair is an incoming Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her current dreams are obsessed with Black girlhood celebration by way of SOLHOT as always,already taking many shapes;Black feminist poetics, sound (listening)and sensorial art + design (interiority) with Black girls locally and worldwide.
2022 Grantees
In October 2022, Orange Tangent Study disbursed 4,500 USD to seven awardees!
Yaa Addae
Yaa Addae is a curator, writer, and artist-researcher whose practice is informed by the liberatory power of the imagination,play, and restorative love economics: bringing love to the systemically underloved. They have led participatory workshops with Autograph ABP, The Church of Black Feminist Thought, The Library of Africa + The African Diaspora, Skate Gals and Pals, and Rumpus Room and spoken at Southbank Centre, Nubuke Foundation, Goethe Instiut Lisbon, King’s College London, and The Barbican. Her writing has been published in The Guardian, Bitch Media, Gal-Dem, Trippin, The Republic Nigeria, and Everything Passes Except The Past (Sternberg Press March 2021) and she was part of the inaugural Frieze New Writers Cohort (2021). In 2020, Yaa was recognized as one of 100 innovators under 30 across the world on the ‘Regenerative List’, an initiative in partnership with Irregular Labs, World Frontier Forum and Gucci.
Ayana Zaire Cotton
Ayana Zaire Cotton is a queer, Black feminist, anti-disciplinary artist and cultural worker from Prince George’s County, Maryland. They are currently based in Dawn, Virginia — tucked in between the ancestral lands of the Mattaponi and Youghtanund — answering the call to steward land that has been in their family for four generations. Braiding language, performance, and craft Ayana speculates and worldbuilds alongside science and technology. Sankofa is a word and symbol of the Akan Twi and Fante languages of Ghana which translates to, "go back and get". Centering a sankofa sensibility, they build databases as vessels holding seed data and experiment with shuffling algorithms to spin non-linear narratives. Ayana calls this methodology “Cykofa Narration”, generating new worlds using the digital and social detritus of our existing world — resulting in a storytelling form that embodies circular time and troubles human authorship. Through engaging with language, technology, and ecology, Ayana is cultivating a practice of remembering and imagining alternative modes of being and interspecies belonging.
Gugulethu Anathi Duma
Gugulethu Duma (aka D U M A M A) explores intersectionality in her transdiscplinary artistic practice allowing the structures in formlessness to simply be. Her practice involves consciously deconstructing and critiquing archaic modes of representation of Southern African/African sonic and performance culture, while also composing music for herself and others. Ritualising modes of togetherness, Dumama is concerned with the ways in which new forms can organically emerge when collaborations can center in intimacy and openness.
Her interests intersect as practice based performance research, and interdisciplinary, collaborative bodies of work centered around political-poetic imaginations. As a compelling storyteller and lyricist, she works to seamlessly to mend together the divide between traditional South African oral culture and futuristic globally-oriented poetics, with a delicate care and awareness of the value of both. As one part of the duo dumama + kechou, Dumama released her debut album buffering juju in 2020. Weaving together childhood songs, stories and personal memories with electronic hues and gestures, she resists typical archival practices around oral traditions and advocates for a recalibration of our transcendental, futuristic Black and African sense of being and belonging.
As an emerging curator and cultural organiser, Gugulethu intentionally works to bring artists together in immersive sensory experiences. Her debut curatorial venture ancestral body noise, produced in collaboration with Oyoun Berlin, is a testament to this. This premiered at the cutting edge curatorial focus, Emobodied Temporalities , as as a performance workshop intervention. This performance workshop and exhibition brought together artists from the diaspora based in Berlin, challenging them to dig into their individual opaque ancestral relations to the African continent, and bring them into the present in order to generate contemporary approaches to forms of ritual and engagements with archiving, performance and narrative making for the future.
Her interests intersect as practice based performance research, and interdisciplinary, collaborative bodies of work centered around political-poetic imaginations. As a compelling storyteller and lyricist, she works to seamlessly to mend together the divide between traditional South African oral culture and futuristic globally-oriented poetics, with a delicate care and awareness of the value of both. As one part of the duo dumama + kechou, Dumama released her debut album buffering juju in 2020. Weaving together childhood songs, stories and personal memories with electronic hues and gestures, she resists typical archival practices around oral traditions and advocates for a recalibration of our transcendental, futuristic Black and African sense of being and belonging.
As an emerging curator and cultural organiser, Gugulethu intentionally works to bring artists together in immersive sensory experiences. Her debut curatorial venture ancestral body noise, produced in collaboration with Oyoun Berlin, is a testament to this. This premiered at the cutting edge curatorial focus, Emobodied Temporalities , as as a performance workshop intervention. This performance workshop and exhibition brought together artists from the diaspora based in Berlin, challenging them to dig into their individual opaque ancestral relations to the African continent, and bring them into the present in order to generate contemporary approaches to forms of ritual and engagements with archiving, performance and narrative making for the future.
Keli Maksd
Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory and identities, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold and works towards destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state.
Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at Salon 94 in New York, NY, Huxley Parlour in UK, the Bamako Biennial in Mali, National Museum of Contemporary Art – Seoul in South Korea, Galería Nueva in Spain and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil in Brazil. Maksud has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (2018 and 2017), the Toronto Arts Council (2015), the Ontario Council for the Arts (2012 and 2014) the New York Foundation for the Arts (2021) and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2022). Her writing has been published in OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, LEAP Magazine and A Space Gallery.
Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at Salon 94 in New York, NY, Huxley Parlour in UK, the Bamako Biennial in Mali, National Museum of Contemporary Art – Seoul in South Korea, Galería Nueva in Spain and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil in Brazil. Maksud has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (2018 and 2017), the Toronto Arts Council (2015), the Ontario Council for the Arts (2012 and 2014) the New York Foundation for the Arts (2021) and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2022). Her writing has been published in OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, LEAP Magazine and A Space Gallery.
Alkebuluan Merriweather
Alkebuluan Merriweather is a Chicago-born and raised artist who received their BA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2019. Their work explores blackness and collective memory through various mediums such as collage, ephemera, and photography. She is most known for her previous archival project titled theblackmatriarcharchive alongside its reiteration homageblkmadonnas.
Almah Lavon Rice
(she/her)
b. 1976
Ancestral Territory of the Osage Nation (Pittsburgh, PA)
IG: @agentsubrosa
︎︎︎ Website
b. 1976
Ancestral Territory of the Osage Nation (Pittsburgh, PA)
IG: @agentsubrosa
︎︎︎ Website
Almah LaVon Rice is a writer, mixed media mail artist, and fairy marsh monster. She is at work on an novella in the key of the AfroSurreal.
Islam & Print
Daniel Talib Latif(he/him)
b.1998
Safiyah Cheatam (she/her)
b. 1995
Baltimore, MD
IG: @_flounders / @ saphicles
︎︎︎ Website
b.1998
Safiyah Cheatam (she/her)
b. 1995
Baltimore, MD
IG: @_flounders / @ saphicles
︎︎︎ Website
Islam & Print (I&P) is a community print space based in Baltimore, MD created by Dan Talib Latif Flounders and Safiyah Cheatam. We aim to champion diverse Muslim experiences and strengthen career readiness by building a network of regional, emerging visual artists of all mediums through our annual year-long screen printing fellowship. I&P strives to prioritize relationship building in cohorts of two to four to co-work, critique, and produce a collection of print editions that will partially exist within I&P’s growing archive of contemporary Muslim artist work and partially remain with the artist.
With plans to expand our services in the future, Islam & Print currently offers monthly group brainstorming / work-in-progress meetings, one-on-one mentorship, technical print education, growth-centered critique environments, artist-to-gallery facilitations, and a culminating group exhibition per cohort.
Safiyah and Dan value their fellow’s quality of time (personal, spiritual, and artistic growth) above their quantity of output (productivity culture), understanding that we are all people first. We emphasize that you do not have to be a printmaker to join Islam & Print and maintain that our varied expertises is a strength of our collective thought.
With plans to expand our services in the future, Islam & Print currently offers monthly group brainstorming / work-in-progress meetings, one-on-one mentorship, technical print education, growth-centered critique environments, artist-to-gallery facilitations, and a culminating group exhibition per cohort.
Safiyah and Dan value their fellow’s quality of time (personal, spiritual, and artistic growth) above their quantity of output (productivity culture), understanding that we are all people first. We emphasize that you do not have to be a printmaker to join Islam & Print and maintain that our varied expertises is a strength of our collective thought.
Andrea Yarbrough
Andrea Yarbrough is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and educator based on the South Side of Chicago nurturing sites of care through a blend of civic engagement and art praxis. Her praxis is embodied through the collaborative placekeeping initiative in c/o: (in care of). The programs and projects produced support writers, curators, farmers, mamas, dancers, organizers, teachers, cultural producers, youth, and visual artists, as artists in residence seeking to explore the intersections of urban ecology, art praxis, and land-use policy.
Andrea’s process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales. By constructing functionally designed objects, cultivating land, archiving and documenting histories of Black women, and curating exhibitions and public programs, her socially-engaged practice exemplifies how communities can reclaim and reconstruct their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over underutilized space.
Andrea’s process transforms quotidian materials, slated for waste streams, into designed and utilitarian objects that serve as community resources, and incorporates the impact of solidarity and circular economies at the material, individual, and communal scales. By constructing functionally designed objects, cultivating land, archiving and documenting histories of Black women, and curating exhibitions and public programs, her socially-engaged practice exemplifies how communities can reclaim and reconstruct their surroundings while navigating agency and ownership over underutilized space.
funded by orange tangent study as well as other donors, the as imminent as bread grant is an unrestricted award for artists who are on the cusp of figuring something out in their practice.
Named after a line in Lucille Clifton’s poem “i am not done yet”, the award seeks to fund artists not just for the production of work, but moreso the creation of circumstances, mindsets, temporary relief, and/or environments to create work. The award funds can be used for anything such as a babysitter, a night stay at a hotel, therapist fees, supplies, etc. The purpose of this award is to acknowledge the wide-ranging needs of artists and to provide a humble, yet sincere infusion of money and support.
In addition to the $1,250 USD grant, all recipients receive a free 60-minute consultation with Orange Tangent Study.
Eligibility
To be eligible for a grant, you must meet the following criteria:
– Identify as an artist
– 18 years old or older at the time of applying
– Able to receive funds via Venmo, PayPal, CashApp, or personal check
If you have questions about the application, please feel free to email us at hello@orangetangent.study. If you would like to be a donor to support more grants, please feel free to email us at hello@orangetangent.study
Cycle #2
![]()
October 15, 2021
Applications closed December 20, 2021.
October 15, 2021
Applications closed December 20, 2021.
Cycle #1
Applications closed July 9, 2021.
Applications closed July 9, 2021.
Congratulations to the seven inaugural grant recipients!
Orange Tangent Study was able to disburse 2,500 USD!
Orange Tangent Study was able to disburse 2,500 USD!
Grantees
Minne Atairu
(she/her/hers)
b. 1992
New York, NY
Minne Atairu is an artist and doctoral student in Art and Art Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research and practice emerge at the intersection of machine learning, Art/Museum education and Black culture. Minne’s ongoing project, Igun AI, addresses a 17-year artistic absence during the interregnum following the 1897 British punitive expedition in Benin Kingdom. Minne is currently a metaLAB Affiliate at Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.
Eric Von Hayes
![]()
(he/him/his)
b. 1985
Chicago, IL
@manny_suena
www.flatlandspress.com
Eric Von Haynes is conceptual artist and printmaker who founded Flatlands Press in Chicago in 2007, focused on producing publications and other printed ephemera for artists worldwide. Flatlands aims to be a community-minded space for artists to create, inspire and share ideas. One of the core tenets at Flatlands Press is community building and making the invisible visible.
Taylor Johnson
(he/they)
b. 1991
New Orleans, LA
Sylvia Jones
b. 1994
Baltimore, MD
Sylvia Jones is a writer, educator, and prison abolitionist. She earned her MFA from American University. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Scalawag, Ponder Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on her debut poetry collection, Buzzard. She lives in Baltimore with her partner and their cat. This upcoming fall she will serve as a Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University.
Belise Nishimwe
(she/her/hers)
b. 2001
Portland, OR
www.iammoreresilient.com/about-belise
Belise Nishimwe, a 2019 Poetry Out Loud Oregon Champion, and Pamplin Media Group Amazing Kids Award Recipient is a poet, scholar, activist, and visionary. She was born and lived in a refugee camp in Tanzania until the age of five when she and her family moved to America through Catholic Charities. Now a U.S. citizen, she has dedicated herself to creating a platform that gives a voice to marginalized people and the representation they need.
Since regaining her love for creative writing and poetry two years ago, she has won a Scholastic Arts and Writing Gold Key and Silver Medal award, been selected for publication in Duke University Press, featured in a Disney Christmas Holiday Special, and a grantee by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council. She has also been featured on ABC, KATU, KOIN, KGW, The Governor’s Office, Catholic Sentinel, Portland Tribune, Pamplin Media, and Oregon Live.
A recent graduate of St. Mary’s Academy, she will be attending Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) on a full-ride, as a distinguished John B. Ervin Scholar.
elizabeth pérez
![]()
b. 1989
Lenape Land -- Bedstuy, BK
@elizabethslashwww.elizabethslash.com
I do a lot of things but the work I am most proud of is mothering my son. My professional career spans industries and has always centered families, and Black and Brown communities. I have just completed a Master's degree at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) program where I've updated my emergency preparedness kit as an artist and educator. At the moment, I work with DOTDOT studio as a producer and this coming fall I'll be thinking of all the ways to build products and services we actually need with equity at the forefront as a Resident at ITP. On days I have childcare and time on my hands, I make ceramics.
Blair Ebony Smith
![]()
b. 1988 (Richmond, Virginia)
living in Champaign, IL
@lovenloops
www.lovenloops.com
Blair loves to rigorously play and make Black girl sounds, spaces, lands, planets, and galaxies with Black girls and those who love them. Her artist-scholar-curator-teacher dreams and praxis emerge where Black girlhood as a creative and relation building life force with Black girls/women, Black feminist poetics, sound, and alternative modes of cultural work and production meet. Her work has explored poetics and sound as practiced with Black girls and collective Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a space/way envisioned by Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006 to celebrateBlack girlhood/Black girls and make our world anew, locally and galaxy-wide. Blair is an incoming Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her current dreams are obsessed with Black girlhood celebration by way of SOLHOT as always,already taking many shapes;Black feminist poetics, sound (listening)and sensorial art + design (interiority) with Black girls locally and worldwide.
Belise Nishimwe, a 2019 Poetry Out Loud Oregon Champion, and Pamplin Media Group Amazing Kids Award Recipient is a poet, scholar, activist, and visionary. She was born and lived in a refugee camp in Tanzania until the age of five when she and her family moved to America through Catholic Charities. Now a U.S. citizen, she has dedicated herself to creating a platform that gives a voice to marginalized people and the representation they need.
Since regaining her love for creative writing and poetry two years ago, she has won a Scholastic Arts and Writing Gold Key and Silver Medal award, been selected for publication in Duke University Press, featured in a Disney Christmas Holiday Special, and a grantee by the Regional Arts and Cultural Council. She has also been featured on ABC, KATU, KOIN, KGW, The Governor’s Office, Catholic Sentinel, Portland Tribune, Pamplin Media, and Oregon Live.
A recent graduate of St. Mary’s Academy, she will be attending Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) on a full-ride, as a distinguished John B. Ervin Scholar.
elizabeth pérez
b. 1989
Lenape Land -- Bedstuy, BK
@elizabethslashwww.elizabethslash.com
I do a lot of things but the work I am most proud of is mothering my son. My professional career spans industries and has always centered families, and Black and Brown communities. I have just completed a Master's degree at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) program where I've updated my emergency preparedness kit as an artist and educator. At the moment, I work with DOTDOT studio as a producer and this coming fall I'll be thinking of all the ways to build products and services we actually need with equity at the forefront as a Resident at ITP. On days I have childcare and time on my hands, I make ceramics.
Blair Ebony Smith
living in Champaign, IL
@lovenloops
www.lovenloops.com
Blair loves to rigorously play and make Black girl sounds, spaces, lands, planets, and galaxies with Black girls and those who love them. Her artist-scholar-curator-teacher dreams and praxis emerge where Black girlhood as a creative and relation building life force with Black girls/women, Black feminist poetics, sound, and alternative modes of cultural work and production meet. Her work has explored poetics and sound as practiced with Black girls and collective Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT), a space/way envisioned by Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown in 2006 to celebrateBlack girlhood/Black girls and make our world anew, locally and galaxy-wide. Blair is an incoming Assistant Professor of Art Education and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her current dreams are obsessed with Black girlhood celebration by way of SOLHOT as always,already taking many shapes;Black feminist poetics, sound (listening)and sensorial art + design (interiority) with Black girls locally and worldwide.