Artist As
First Responder
Artist as first responder
: seed member spotlight Interview by : Adéniké AminPhotography : Sasha KelleyAdéniké: Ashara (Founder, Executive Creative Director) Artists as First Responders’ (AAFR) founding idea, “artists show up first in crisis and celebration,” is both poetic and radical. Can you tell me about the moment when you knew this collective needed to exist?
Ashara: The idea came from observing what was already true. In moments of grief, joy, transition, protest, and rebirth, artists are always the first ones who step forward to hold emotional, spiritual, and imaginative space for our communities. They are singing, cooking, documenting, archiving stories, tending to the altar, and painting the walls of neighborhoods under threat of erasure. They are protecting memories and pointing toward a future at the same time.
I realized we needed an ecosystem that recognized this work as essential. AAFR exists because our survival has always required creativity, ceremony, and collective imagination. We are naming it, resourcing it, and protecting the ones who carry that labor.
A: The collective’s footprint spans San Francisco, East Oakland, Sacramento, and even Nigeria, with members like Ietef “DJ Cavem” Vita. How does geography inform your work and your sense of community?
Ashara : Black culture is global, and our work reflects that truth.
We are deeply rooted in Oakland and Detroit, and our community moves along cultural routes that cross oceans. This past year, our team traveled and worked across the United States, including the Deep South, and also to Nigeria, Cuba, Jamaica, Senegal, France, South Africa, and Brazil in collaboration with artists, healers, elders, and organizers. These journeys return andreconnect us to our shared roots. We understand community as something held inside creative and spiritual practices as well as cultural and political movements.
Ashara Ekundayo — Founder, Executive Creative Director
Ietef “DJ Cavem” Vita — Climate Futures and Legacy Manager
NiQueen Jones — Director of Abundance
Christian Walker — Community Wellness and Design Manager
Additional Artist As First Responder Members : Marcella Sanchez — Studio Manager, Zandashe Brown — Digital Media Manager, Sam McGinnis — Executive Assistant to the Creative Director
A: Chris (Men’s Wellness Fellowship) and NiQueen (education, hip-hop history, youth empowerment) bring vastly different practices under AAFR’s umbrella. How do you hold those diverse practices in conversation with one another?
Ashara : We honor each other’s differences as a strength and represent different puzzle pieces that are essential to forming the whole. I am the Curator: visionary, mentor, fire, and connector. I see the big picture and sharpen this team like iron sharpening iron. NiQueen is the definition of a multihyphenate artist with a strong history of youth and community empowerment, who has key administrative skills that keep us flowing. Christian is a fashion and graphic designer/entrepreneur, who creates space for Black men to practice emotional literacy, accountability, and community care through the Men’s Wellness Fellowship. Ietef “DJ Cavem” is vocal and passionate about food justice, climate futures, plant medicine, and sonic storytelling;he steers Prana to the People. Marcella is an amazing professional photographer who directs our space at AAFR’s Minnesota Street Project studio, where she shapes workflow and atmosphere. Zandashe brings cinematic vision and digital narrative; her storytelling powers our communications.. Sam, my executive assistant, is a crafter and multidisciplinary creative who is deeply involved in mutual aid and community care.
We do not force these practices into one shape. We work our strengths and are inspired to grow and expand by working with each other toward shared goals.
A: That’s amazing. I love that there are all these different pieces that make up the whole. AAFR describes itself as an arts ecosystem for Black-led, Black-serving work—residencies, portals, and community forums. What does “ecosystem” mean here in practical terms?
Ashara : Ecosystem means interdependence. Our work is held through a four-point platform: Ecosystems, which activates public space for storytelling. Residencies, which offer time and supported space for research, creation, and reflection. Then there’s Public Forums, which host intergenerational dialogue and collective healing. And finally Archives, which ensure our stories are preserved and accessible across generations. These programs are living channels that feed each other. Activity in one area nourishes growth in the others.
A: The “Portals” in East Oakland, that residency space in SF, and AAFR’s international reach: how do you balance local roots with global ambition without losing your grounding?
Ashara: We find the balance by showing up with integrity and nurturing universally shared values. The AfroPortals Project Space and Archive is located at the Black Cultural Zone’s Liberation Park in East Oakland and is developed in partnership with Shared Studios. It is an interactive arts, design, media, literary, and cultural memory laboratory grounded in AfroFuturism, Black memory, and abundance. Through two retrofitted shipping containers, we host exhibitions, global talks, art shares, performances, archiving, and intergenerational exchange. The AfroPortals create life-sized, real-time bridges across the African diaspora, allowing people in Oakland to speak, sing, learn, and dream with communities in Lagos, Johannesburg, Addis Ababa, Kigali, Mexico City, Bamako, Nakivale, and beyond. Since 2023, we have facilitated 44 AfroPortals activations globally and hosted 10 exhibitions featuring artists, scholars, elders, and youth who find connection with people across the globe whom they may have otherwise never met.
This year, we also facilitated 14 AfroPortals global talks at the FNB Joburg Art Fair in South Africa, the continent’s leading and longest-running contemporary art fair, in partnership with STILL Artist Residency. Being there affirmed that the work we do in East Oakland is part of a broader cultural continuum. It made clear that we are moving within a connected world of Black artistic practice.
We are grounded locally through monthly programs such as the Men’s Wellness Fellowship and Prana to the People at the Huey P. Newton Foundation’s Black Panther Party Museum. These offerings are free to the public and led by artists. The Men’s Wellness Fellowship is facilitated by Christian Walker with Karega Bailey, whose work centers on emotional literacy and grief healing. Prana to the People is a BIPOC-centered practice of yoga, breathwork, and somatic care stewarded by DJ Cavem and guided by a roster of community-rooted Black healing arts practitioners. These programs affirm that our first responsibility is the wellness of our own community.
Our residency space in San Francisco provides artists with time, space, and tools to build, study, and create. Black creativity exists on a continuum that is both local and global, which is inseparable.
A: Speaking of inseparable, many of your members live what you call “dual lives” as artists and organizers. How do you support the well-being of people who are doing so much, often under pressure?
Ashara : We do our best to practice care as culture. We breathe together. We check on each other before we check on the work. We make space for whatever someone is carrying that day. If someone needs a pause, we honor it. If someone is moving through transition or grief, we adjust our expectations. Care is part of how we relate and move together as we do this work.
Everyone in AAFR is a practicing artist, and each of us is multifaceted: emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical. We personally overstand the challenges that come with living in this system. We encourage each other through our personal and creative processes.
A: For an artist who has never been through a structured residency or fellowship before, what experience would they find working with AAFR?
Ashara : An artist working with AAFR will find belonging. We offer time and room to listen to oneself. Artists are supported by other artists who understand the dimensions of creative labor. We cultivate growth through conversation, reflection, shared practice, and trust.
The residency is a place where you can arrive as you are. We honor cultural lineage and personal history. Support may look like opportunities to exhibit, in-person and/or IG artist talks, collaboration with other artists within our ecosystem, etc. We also give space for quiet, laughter, research, making, or simply being witnessed without expectation.
This is a way of strengthening your capacity to move through the world with clarity and confidence in your artistic voice..
A: Ashara, you have described your own curatorial and art-making practice alongside your role with AAFR. How does each inform the other?
Ashara : My curatorial work and AAFR are extensions of the same practice. I have been an independent curator for over thirty years. My work has always centered on artists as cultural workers, memory keepers, and vision holders. I move with the belief that art is not separate from daily life. It is how we understand who we are, where we have been, and where we are going.
AAFR emerged from that understanding. The collective is a living exhibition of how Black creativity circulates through community, gathers power, and generates new worlds. At the same time, the collective teaches me. I am shaped by all of the artists I work alongside: their questions, their experiments, their courage. We learn from one another. My practice is to listen, to tend, and to build conditions where creativity can unfold with dignity and clarity.
Ashara : When I say artists save lives, I am talking about how creativity restores the capacity to feel, to choose, and to imagine a future. I see this in the work of Ietef “DJ Cavem” Vita, who coined the term eco hip hop and became the first artist to distribute an album through a USDA organic seed packet. His climate justice work teaches youth in ways that reach them when other messaging does not. He teaches them that caring for the planet and its future can be cool…that it can be joyful, expressive, stylish, powerful, and rooted in culture. I have watched young people who felt trapped by their circumstances begin to see themselves as creators, growers, protectors. Moving youth from gangs to gardens is a shift in identity. It is a return to agency.
Art saves lives by giving people a place to put what has no place to go. When someone is carrying grief, anger, loneliness, or confusion with nowhere to release it, the body holds that weight. Creative outlets allow emotion to move instead of hardening inside. An image, a song, a film, a poem, a dance, a drum beat. They remind a person that they are still here. They show that change is possible.
Art also unifies us in times of struggle. When people experience it together, they remember that they are not isolated in what they carry. Art turns “I am alone in this” into “we are here together.” That shift is real. That shift saves lives.
When I say artists save lives, I mean that literally. Creativity interrupts despair. It reorders the spirit. It gives someone the will to continue.
This is the work. This is why we are here.
A: You’ve said artists “heal communities and save lives.” Could you share a moment when you witnessed AAFR’s impact not just on art but on real lives?
A: What do y’all see as the biggest barrier now facing Black art and culture organizations in the Bay Area, and how is AAFR positioned to respond?
Ashara : A major barrier is sustainability. The work of Black artists shapes identity, belonging, and future-making, yet the conditions that support this work are fragile. Rising costs, political shifts, loss of elders, and institutional divestment create pressure. There is also an erasure taking place in neighborhoods shaped by Black creativity.
AAFR responds by staying rooted in relationships. Even as physical spaces shift during construction or transition, our programming continues in partnership with cultural centers, museums, community spaces, and neighbors.
The work is ongoing because the community itself is the site.
We are also deepening our commitment to archiving. We are documenting stories, images, recordings, teachings, and practices with intention. The archive keeps cultural memory accessible. It ensures that future generations can trace how we lived, created, and cared for one another.
We are here to support the ongoing life of Black cultural practice in the Bay Area. We are here to carry memory, to hold connection, and to keep possibilities open across generations
A: Looking ahead through the end of this year and beyond, what’s the one thing you’d like people to carry with them after reading this interview about Artist As First Responder?
Ashara : Artists are essential to the well-being of humanity. Their work shapes how we understand ourselves, how we care for one another, and how we imagine what is possible. The presence of the artist is a form of guidance, memory, and future-making. The message I want people to carry is simple: support artists. Stand with artists. Invest in artists, Believe artists. The future depends on it.
Learn more about their work : artistasfirstresponder.com/