Beyond Beta Campaign

"Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilizations's radical voice." - Paul Robeson.

Black Lunch Table has always been about both in-person and digital collectivities and within this current moment, as artists, we are thinking about creative solutions to operating within these new constraints and are mindful of the many changes [ethical, ideological, practical, financial…] bound up in this online shift. We are hopeful that our adapted approach to operating within these spaces will remain flexible, generative, and affirming.

Artists are central to all facets of BLT. Artists need to be paid for their time and efforts. Thank you for joining us!

Without each of you, Black Lunch Table (BLT) could not exist, for our project, your project, is not simply the sum of its parts, but, documentation of your generosity, trust, tenacity and vulnerability, and it is an action of radical archiving. BLT also asks you to read the world in a slightly different way, to consider another perspective, it’s a prompt to examine the threads of connection we all have, a mirror and magnifying glass on our relationships to each other and the world, holistically. It boldly requests for you to care enough to have a conversation with your neighbor and to let the world witness your voice! We ask that you take a seat at the table. 

As a non-profit organization, BLT relies on contributions from foundations, corporations and individual participants like you to continue to correct and fill gaps in our historical records and to make the archive free and accessible. 

Your 100% tax-deductible gifts in any amount 

will help us continue to do the work. 

Your contribution will help subsidize our project with at least two new community partners this year in locations we haven’t visited yet. You will help us process and add the hours of conversations we have collected but not yet been able to upload to the BLT searchable archive. You also help us innovate the field! We are creating a UX reading tool, Linked Open Data and work with ever evolving Data Visualization! With your contribution, students, teachers, artists and curators will grow up with a better understanding of Black artists’ work from all over the world. We have the opportunity to shape history to reflect reality!

In the last three years over 600 people from over 25 places and 3 countries on two continents have contributed their voices and energy to the BLT archive. In the last three years, we’ve hosted 72 Wikipedia events in 6 different countries, where we created 385 new articles and uploaded 727 new images. And we are only getting started. None of this could happen without your support, especially now!

With your donation, you are not only supporting BLT, you are setting a seat at the table for the hundreds of Black artists and community members who have (and will have) generously contributed their thoughts, experiences and life lessons to the archive, you are enabling a self authored teaching tool and resource and you are making our historical records more equitable!

“I often wonder, now being the elder, how many [dining tables] do I remember, and how many have I forgotten? ... Stories connect us 

and are the roots to who we were, are and can be. I am grateful to those who paid attention to the 

stories of their elders and helped to create this format."

 - Judith H., 2020 Beyond Beta donor.

Thank you for joining the BLT vision.

Peace,

Heather + Jina + The BLT Team

About Black Lunch Table:

Black Lunch Table(BLT) seeks to mobilize a democratic rewriting of contemporary cultural history by animating discourse around and among the people living it and directly confronts issues of authorship in humanities and sociopolitical discourses.  We are currently focused on the production of two roundtable series’--the Artists’ Table and the People’s Table--and a series of Wikipedia workshops.  Our roundtable sessions provide both physical space and allotted time for interdisciplinary and intergenerational discussions, bringing together a diversity of community members and fostering candid conversations. We audio master, transcribe, and metadata tag the conversations from the individual tables for inclusion on our dynamic, searchable online archive. And at our Wikipedia events, we train participants to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives and works of black visual artists. 

blacklunchtable.org