CHARM TAYLOR
MISSISSIPPI DELTA, 2022 - 2023
Charm Taylor, the St Louis-born, New Orleans-living queen, whose recordings include The Road Within and She Is the Future, is a multi-disciplinary transformative artist whose work reflects her visions of a world that is vibrant, innovative, and healed. Taylor embodies the powerful cultural legacies of her ancestors and the arts activists before her. As an artivist, Charm Taylor’s works range from futuristic trap laced records and soulfully charged anthems for the people’s love revolution to immersive performance installations and high frequency multimedia art. She is the future where art is alchemy activating change and evoking spiritual evolution.
Charm has been working with CitizenShe and Ashé Cultural Arts Center performing & speaking on restorative justice through the lens of ARTivism, as well as laying the groundwork for social impact in the revolutionary Web3/NFT space focused on digital community building, creator ownership, and economic redevelopment using emerging blockchain technology. She’s released new music and was featured in her first exhibition at Tulane University: Unthinkable Imagination: A creative response to the juvenile justice crisis, in her AAW year.
CULTURE HUB
Located in New Orleans, LA, Ashé Cultural Arts Center’s charge, as issued by co-founder, Mama Carol Bebelle, is to “to fly in leaps and gusts of provocation, instigation, inspiration and aspiration...to call for and exhibit the higher standards of justice, integrity, and kindness for all...to be brilliant conductors of opportunity, creators of vision, navigators of bs, advocates of culture, and defenders of children...to make real the majesty of dreams, to make plain the magic of being, to manifest the difference between perceiving and seeing.”
The Center’s innovative programming is designed to utilize culture in fostering human development and civic engagement. The organization maintains 10,000 square feet of gallery space and 20,000 square feet of performance space to create and preserve opportunities for the curation, exhibition, and commission of fine, folk, and fine-folk art. Producing over 350 music, theater, dance, spoken word, drum circles, and multi-disciplinary events a year, Ashé believes in art as a paradigm-shifting call to action. Ashé makes place and keeps place on behalf of a community facing growing displacement, asserting a collective right to stay and return. As ecosystem builders, Ashé delivers programming and direct services that support, leverage, and celebrate the people, places, and philosophies of the African Diaspora. For more information, visit ashenola.org.
SOCIAL IMPACT INITIATIVE
Citizen SHE (fiscally sponsored 501(c)3 and Citizen SHE United 501(c)4 are sister organizations that envision a Louisiana that respects and responds to the multidimensional needs of Black women from every walk of life. SHE is weaving a new tapestry of engaged Black women who will become Louisiana’s advocates, operatives, decision makers, and power brokers. SHE’s work reorganizes Louisiana’s power structures to recognize Black women as activists, leaders, and influencers who represent a crucial base of power. SHE’s strategies include leadership development, policy creation, collective advocacy, cultivating candidates, training campaigners, mobilizing Black voters, and engaging elected officials.