Missing Black women subject of art display

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- An estimated 64,000 Black women are missing in the United States. Now, a new exhibit is shining a light on that and the experience of Black women.

The show at the Urban Arts Space is titled, “No One Teachers Us How To Be Daughters.”

The show is curated by Ajanaé Dawkins, a community artist-in-residence at the Urban Arts Space. She said the exhibition is a love letter to Black women and their experience with love, joy, and grief.    

The idea of this exhibition was born from Dawkins thinking about the epidemic of missing Black women in this country, which she knows firsthand after her aunt went missing in the 1990s.   

“I have somebody in my family who had at one point gone missing and I watched and witnessed the impact of what it meant for a Black woman in my family to go missing and that impact on a lot of other folks,” Dawkins said. “So, I've done a lot of work around missing Black women.” 

The exhibit also features work from six other local artists and their perspectives on this topic. Iyana Hill is one of those artists and believes the art can show the variation of the lived experience of a Black woman.

“I think the show in itself is so important because it allows us to imagine that Black women celebrate Black women and also touch on topics of grief, touch on topics of community in that space,” Hill said.

Dawkins hopes the exhibition will be a place that gives people the opportunity to see Black women in a different light and that the show will have a lasting effect on all those who come to see it.

“I hope that people have the opportunity to reflect and maybe think about their own lineages, think about their own investment and whose voice is in stories they want to preserve, whose voices and stories mean something to them, and who's been important to the formation of their identity,” Dawkins said.

Artists like Matthew Pitts are looking forward to the public being able to see their work and leave feeling inspired and informed.

“I'm really excited to be able to showcase that here," Pitts said. “The Urban Arts Space, just because of the lineage of the work that they're doing and also the real intentionality behind the exhibit.”

The exhibition opens this Thursday, July 11, and runs through Aug. 3. Click here to learn more.