05/21/2026
What an incredible privilege to join the incredible panel at Spiralis Gallery in Easton, Maryland, for their exhibition “Shall We Gather At The River.”
The conversation centered on water as a powerful conduit for culture, identity, and spirituality across the African diaspora but it also opened the door to a much larger, urgent dialogue about systemic equity in the art ecosystem.
As a lawyer and an advocate, my focus is always on where power sits. Right now, on average, less than 2% of the works in major U.S. museums are by African American artists, and for Black women, that number plummets to a staggering 0.05%.
We cannot afford to cede our cultural authority to institutions, agencies, or traditional gatekeepers while we wait for them to validate our narratives. We are our own curators. We define the market and preserve our own histories by:
Exercising our individual authority to decide what culture looks like.
Investing our dollars directly in living artists and the independent galleries that champion them.
Bringing art into our homes and offices to actively disrupt sanitized spaces with visual storytelling that reflects our true communities.
Collecting isn’t a passive hobby reserved for a select elite; it is a profound act of advocacy, narrative reclamation, and asset-building. When we buy a piece of art, we aren’t just engaging in a transaction . . . we are investing in a dream, preserving a timeline, and setting the market value for overlooked voices!
A huge thank you to curator and moderator Zudeka, my fellow panelist Jean Danielle Laontan, and for bringing us all together for this deeply spiritual and necessary conversation.
Don’t worry if you missed the conversation, you can still watch the full panel discussion at my YouTube channel! You’ll can listen and hear how to join me and explore how you can step into your own power as a collector and cultural advocate!
