Ujima Presents...RISE
- Christian Boyd
- Sep 19, 2017
- 3 min read
We exist in a tumultuous time: socially, politically, and economically. And for the oppressed, these challenging times appear to be a vicious and persistent reminder that history inevitably repeats itself. For Ujima, solace is found in Solange’s album, A Seat at the Table. Intended as manuscript for self-discovery and self-empowerment, Solange’s words—the truth in her words and the fortitude of her words—offer a universal healing.
One of the most beautiful milestones of the journey to self-empowerment is the recognition of choice. While we are often unable to choose the circumstances we exist in, we do have the power to choose how we respond to them—the actions that we take, the words that we speak, the way that we impact others along the way. We have the power to choose whether we will let these challenging times harden and stifle us, or whether we will rise to the challenges and contribute to the manifestation of a free, equal, tolerant, and formidable self and world...there is power in choice.
Solange recognizes that power in her album’s opening song, Rise. In it, Solange not only articulates the power and necessity of choice, but of action as well. She tells us that we can choose to merely exist in our current state and continue to face the challenges that we do day-to-day, go to bed, wake up, and repeat:
Fall in your ways, so you can crumble
Fall in your ways, so you can sleep at night
Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise.
Or we can act—we can acknowledge the spaces we live in, we can celebrate the skin we are in, and we can move in ways that will allow us to confront challenges, give us peace of mind, and strengthen us to wake up and face the world day after day:
Walk in your ways, so you won’t crumble
Walk in your ways, so you can sleep at night
Walk in your ways, so you will wake up and rise.
Rise, as it is the opening and sets the tone for Solange’s album, it is the opening and sets the tone for Ujima’s vision and work.
RISE is a photo series illustrating Ujima’s nine principles: Unity, Justice, Intersectionality, Creativity, Joy, Resilience, Vision, Self-Determination and Liberation. We wanted to celebrate the beauty that is blackness and the diversity that is blackness. That beauty and diversity is represented by our models and the variance in their size, age, skin tone, gender, and sexual orientation. Each model was clad in white for a very specific purpose. While white is viewed as a bold contrast to black in both appearance and connotation, we chose to expose the inextricable oneness of blackness and the color white. White represents light, goodness, positivity, safety, brilliance...and we see no contrast between those meanings and Black people. Additionally, the photoshoot took place in nature to represent a new beginning - air as freedom, land as opportunity, flowers as kindness, forest as knowledge, water as peace, and sky as hope.
Ujima is so proud of this debut, and we look forward to continuing to create, to inspire, to support, to engage, to expose, to educate, to motivate, and to uplift through art. Through art we are powerful, and through art, we are free.
(See the full RISE gallery in the Collaborations tab of SMOOVE)
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