About Black Curator’s Lab (BlkCL)
The Black Curator’s Lab (BlkCL) is a studio-based residency for ideation, research, making, and rest for Black independent curators living and working primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. Designed and stewarded by independent curator Ashara Ekundayo. Curators-In-Residence (CIR) are individual emerging to mid-career professionals who are working on upcoming exhibitions and/or expanding their own visual arts practice.
The BlkCL is located at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighborhood and is part of our ongoing collaborative, experimental programming operating at the intersection of abundance, curiosity, scholarship, and self-determination.
BlkCL 2023-2024 inaugural year is co-sponsored by AECreative Consulting Partners LLC, the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the African American Art & Culture Complex, and the Culture Change Fund.
Adrian Burrell (April 2024 - April 2025)
Curator-In-Residence
Adrian Burrell is a third-generation Oakland artist utilizing photography, installation, and experimental media. His work examines issues of race, class, and intergenerational dynamics, inviting moments where collective storytelling could be a site for remembering.
Burrell has lived and worked on four continents. He received his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and MFA at Stanford University where he also lectured and served as Black Graduate student community outreach chair, and was a visiting artist at the Institute for Diversity in Arts. He has held artist residencies at the Black Freedom Fellowship in Salvador, Brazil, San Francisco FILM, YBCA, and the Black Rock residency in Dakar, Senegal.
Burrell's work has been featured in the New Yorker, Black Star Film Festival, PopUp Magazine, Photo Ville, the Pingyao International Photography Festival China, and SXSW, among others. His first monograph, Sugarcane and Lightning, is currently available for order through Minor Matters Publishing.
Henry L. Davis III (November 2023)
Curator-In-Residence
Henry L. Davis III is a local San Francisco writer, journalist and archival student. During his time at the Black Curator’s Lab (BlkCL), in addition to developing a strategy for the curatorial space at the African American Arts & Cultural Complex, Henry will also be studying and design planning for his own environmental research zine, studying graphic design, and practicing studio/mix engineering.
Marcella Sanchez (October 2023)
Curator-In-Residence
Marcella Sanchez is a queer, biracial adoptee, photographer, videographer, and medical cannabis advocate. She began her love of photography as a child growing up in Oakland, CA, and soon became obsessed with the fundamentals that make a great photograph: lighting, balance, composition, and use of space. She shares her passion and skill through private sessions, community events and individual portrait photography.
She was the founder & lead photographer of Greenkind, the first medical cannabis magazine.Her photography has been featured in multiple shows on the East and West Coast, in magazines, in a national billboard campaign, and online. She is the recipient of the Dream Keeper Enterprising Creative Cohort Grant. She is currently working on her ongoing project Be Seen: The Genius and Gaze of Black Creatives. She enjoys shooting events, weddings, her QTBIPOC community and bringing a non-intrusive narrative to each event she shoots.
Ashley K. Arnold (September 2023)
Curator-In-Residence
Ashley K. Arnold is a printmaker and photographer based in the Bay Area, expresses her emotions through her work, including anger, happiness, and sadness. Her art revolves around several key themes deeply rooted in her African-American and person of color heritage. One prominent symbol recurrently featured in her art is the image of a rose, which she has been incorporating into her work since 2000. She believes that the beauty of the rose remains unaffected by its color.
Ashley also emphasizes the importance of family and children within the African-American community, which she incorporates into her artistic expressions. She holds a strong belief that African-American mothers and women are the most influential role models in her community, and the core purpose of her work is to share and celebrate their strength and resilience.
Trayvon Smith (June 2023)
Curator-In-Residence
Tray Smith is a San Francisco native who has an intense passion for art ventures, photography & building community. He is a strong believer in using his talents to give back to the community and believes that everyone deserves to have their stories told and their voices heard- an advocate for black and queer visibility. He uses his business Realest Exposure to platform the voices of those who are often marginalized. Tray is dedicated to curating, creating and contributing to safe spaces where BIPOC and queer people can be their authentic selves, and he works tirelessly to make sure that everyone has a seat at the table.
About Our Artists-in-Residence (AIRs)
Artists respond at the edges of Birth and Death by rescuing, making, and stewarding creative pursuits on the frontline edges of catastrophe and celebration.
Below are our 2021-2023 Artists-in-Residence and Fellows
Christopher Burch (Summer 2022 - Summer 2023)
Muralist-In-Residence
Christopher Burch is an artist, events organizer, and educator based in San Francisco and St. Louis. He received the Painting Fellowship for his graduate studies at the San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 2008) and is a graduate of Columbia College with a BFA in 2002. Burch’s works report from the intersections of re-invention, mythology, folklore and history. Depicting, bodies, acts, objects, and ideas within a process of co-emergence, slippage, and simultaneity. Burch’s aesthetic, fully realized as a surreal personal language, utilizes the grotesque, the abject, and the ironic, as accomplices within his own form of storytelling. Burch's works find their greatest strength in his eloquent, thoughtful manner of interpreting and investigating some of humanity's most disquieting realities.
Reverend Marvin K. White (Summer 2022)
Poet-In-Residence
Marvin K. White, MDiv, is currently the Full-Time Minister of Celebration at the historic Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, CA. He is a graduate of the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA and the inaugural Public Theologian in Residence ('17-'18) at First Church Berkeley. Marvin is an ordained deacon at City of Refuge UCC. He was co-facilitator of the "Faith Leaders Round Table" at The Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society and was a recent recipient (’17-’18) of the YBCA Fellowship, “What Does Equity Look Like?”, a program that brought together creative citizens from across the Bay Area - artists and everyday people alike - to engage in a yearlong process of inquiry, dialogue, and project generation.
He is the author of four collections of poetry published by RedBone Press: Our Name Be Witness; Status; and the two Lammy-nominated collections last rights and nothin’ ugly fly. His poetry has been anthologized in The Road Before Us: 100 Black Gay Poets; My Brothers Keeper; Gents, Bad Boys and Barbarians: New Gay Writing; Things Shaped in Passing; Sojourner: Writing in the Age of AIDS; Bum Rush the Page; Role Call; and Think Again, as well as other local and national publications. He is the co-editor of If We Have to Take Tomorrow: HIV, Black Men & Same Sex Desire.
His poetry has been adapted for stage at San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros and he has performed his work himself at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as a part of their 2014 BAN7 Festival. As a former member of the critically acclaimed theater troupe The Pomo Afro Homos’ he has performed nationally and internationally. Learn More About Rev. White Here.
Ra Malika Imhotep (Spring 2022)
Poet-In-Residence
the intellectual + creative work of Ra/Malika Imhotep, ph.d, tends to the relationships between queer embodiment, Black femininity, vernacular culture, & the performance of labor.
Ra/Malika is co-convener of an embodied spiritual-political education project called The Church of Black Feminist Thought a member of The Black Aesthetic and the proud child of D. Makeda Johnson and Akbar Imhotep.
core commitments: Black feminism, Disability Justice, Black vernacular culture, Dirty South Epistemologies, Black Queer lifeworlds, Afro-Diasporic networks, Poetics, Tenderness, Compassion, black study, Liberation from ALL systems of oppression
an obiligatory note on gender: Ra/Malika Imhotep identifies as an agender black femme in deep and principled relationship to blk wimmin, black [trans + cis] women, and gender-non-conforming Black femmes. Ra/Malika prefers not to be referred to using gendered pronouns but for the sake of legibility and conversational ease Ra/Malika responds to“they/them” and “she/her” pronouns.
Tongo Eisen-Martin (Winter 2021)
Poet-In-Residence
Tongo Eisen-Martin was born in San Francisco and earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. In their citation, the judges for the Griffin Prize wrote that Eisen-Martin’s work “moves between
trenchant political critique and dreamlike association, demonstrating how, in the right hands, one mode might energize the other—keeping alternative orders of meaning alive in the face of radical injustice ... His poems are places where discourses and vernaculars collide and recombine into new configurations capable of expressing outrage and sorrow and love.”
Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He lives in San Francisco. Follow Tongo Here.
Tonya M. Foster (Fall 2021)
Poet-In-Residence
Tonya M. Foster is a poet, essayist, and Black womanist scholar. She is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Teaching Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on poetry, poetics, ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She was a member of the multi-disciplinary advisory committee for the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Her essay for the exhibition’s 2021 field guide,“Time, Memory, and Living in Shotgun Houses in the South of the South City of New Orleans,” expands her meditations on place and poetics. Tonya serves as the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University.
