In June 2020, Facebook launched a new section of its app (currently only for US users), a platform titled Lift Black Voices that serves to highlight Black stories and share educational and fundraising resources. Six months on, the initiative has grown and recently invited its first external guest curators, Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, to hold a virtual residency for three weeks. Drew and Wortham just published their anticipated first co-authored book Black Futures in December 2020, and their hand-picked collection of projects for Lift Black Voices continues the mission of that publication.
Black Futures started as a direct message exchange on Twitter, Drew and Wortham explain in a blog post about the Facebook collaboration, and has evolved into a shared desire to archive a moment. Drew is an influential art curator and writer, known as Instagrams @museummammy and formerly of the Met; while Wortham is a well-known journalist and culture writer for The New York Times. The book is intended as a dwelling place for our most precious cultural exports in a moment in which so much of the contributions of Black people from memes to groundbreaking scientific discoveries is still subject to erasure and co-option they continue in their statement. In turn they hope to record some of what the most dynamic artists, writers, thinkers and musicians of our time made during an unprecedented era of cultural, social, economic and ecological revolutions.
Similarly, their co-curated collection for Lift Black Voices spotlights essays, videos, posts and portals from across Facebook, which they describe as a visual feast of healers, artists, and abolitionists who have impacted us, online and off that aims to provide an inspiring snippet of the flourishing world of Black creativity and art. These centre on themes of Systems of Care, Justice, Memory and Legacy, Ownership, and Joy.read more
Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham are the first guest curators of Facebook’s Lift Black Voices
