The intention of my work is to uplift black voices, atone for racial injustice and facilitate conversations around our country's unresolved relationship with enslavement and the Civil War.  In 2018, I visited six states on a Civil Rights Tour of the South. This pilgrimage educated me on the depth and the tenacity of white supremacy woven into the fabric of our country. This awareness fuels my grief around racial injustice.

During the George Floyd protests, I spent days photographing the graffiti on the Confederate Monuments, in Richmond, Virginia, with the idea of making a two-sided American Flag from those images.  In piecing the flag together, I wanted to use as many patterns as possible to symbolically include as many voices as possible. One of those patterns was made from a sticker containing a quote from Funeral of a Nation.  That sticker led me to the 30-minute musical essay by Hardcover.

Dawn Flores cycles between writing, performance and the visual arts, working in painting, photography and fiber arts. She uses salvaged material to construct assemblage pieces and designs fabric patterns that are sewn into quilts.

Using the rituals of remembrance and grief, she creates work inspired by the ephemeral beauty of the natural world, and in response to environmental and social injustices. Flores collaborates with communities to curate performances and exhibitions that inform and inspire.

From 2015-2023, her focus was documenting 60 acres of urban forest, before, during and after, it was clear cut for residential development. The Forest Project, enlisted the aid of over 1,000 volunteers that collected millions of seeds, rescued 2,000 plants and produced over 200 works of art. This land-based reclamation dovetailed into atonement work, when she began acknowledging the history of the land she was documenting.

My art career started with creative writing—researching and experimenting with the idea that abstract art has a knowable and communicable vocabulary. I coined the term “blackstraction” to refer to the objectification of abstract painting in 2000, the result of research that began in 1980. Then a poet looking at language as art, I began to see poetry as the original formalist abstract art because a poem’s meaning is based on relationships created with words contained in the body of the work. Now, I make objects based on materials and process, creating installations around social and/or aesthetic ideas that integrate image, object, and frame into pictures or settings that read as something familiar. Philosophically and socially, I work to strengthen the artist’s relationship with the public at large and to challenge how and where “art” is defined.

Sheila Crider is currently based in Baltimore, an artist who lived and worked in nearby Washington, DC for most of her career. She started her practice as a visual artist with “The Original Response Handmade Envelopes and Books” in art fairs and craft markets. In the mid 1990’s, she began to submit work made from hand dyed papers to open calls to seek exhibition opportunities. In 2009, she was awarded the first of many public art projects. In 2022 and 2017 she received $10,000 fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her work is included in many public and private collections including Art In Public Places (WDC), The African American Museum (Dallas, Texas), The James E Lewis Museum (Baltimore, Maryland), The Library of Congress Print Collection, The State Department Print Collection, The DC Public Library Collection, Ranger Italia (Serengo, Italy) and The Mino Washi Museum (Mino, Japan). To learn more about the artist visit her website.