ARTIST STATEMENT
I practice object design within a socially engaged practice. I study historic preservation and the built environment and create material objects that teach Black culture. My focus is to translate the symbolic, logical, mathematical knowledge of Black culture into interactive material objects.
This project began with the Afrofuture Education conference in 2019, hosted at the Houston Museum of African American Culture in Houston, TX. The conference focused on how to utilize Afrofuturism in educational practices. Participants at the conference were required to create within the following criteria: interactive communication tools that allow the community to explore relationships, inherited practices, and personal experiences. These tools center first and foremost the role of relationships—the power of connection and care to empower the target audience to take ownership of the approaches to social issues.
In our research, we came across the history of collaborative quilt making and its role in movement building in the United States. Quilting circles held in churches and community centers formed the basis for larger movements aiding labor, suffrage, and civil rights in the United States. Within African American culture, the quilt is a communication tool that shares a way of seeing the space. This project connects the ways earlier generations of African American women designed quilts based on their interpretation of space to methods of organizing information and building architecture that passes on information that is accessible to all participants.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
My name is Schetauna Powell; I am a centennial Houston native practicing design and design thinking to create tools for education. I currently practice design arts with a concentration on the built environment and material objects that teach Black culture. My design practice has its roots in my BA in English Literature, MA in Pan African Studies, and current MFA in Designed Objects. My main foci are to translate books written by Black Studies scholars into interactive material objects; to design space so as to maximize the use value of that space for African American cultural practice; and to archive our work for future use.
My design firm, Artivism Community Art, utilizes interactive design, education design, and historic preservation in a community engaged practice. I understand my role as a designer and my advocacy work as one in the same. It is the role of the advocate to listen, preserve, internalize, and produce tools for the community to collaborate. I believe it my role to use my design practice to create tools to access the symbolic, philosophical, logical-mathematical information of the African Diaspora, to translate complex information into simple interactions the community can implement in their everyday lives, and to archive the work.
© Schetauna Powell