Meta-Narratives: Same Story with New Eyes

Our goal is to create narratives that sculpt possibility from stone-edged pain.

Black Wall Street was a post-slavery community in Tulsa, Oklahoma strategically planned with dignity and a black business on every corner. Greenwood was a hub for black innovation and entrepreneurship. A vibrant Mecca of commerce and community so rich that statesman and scientist Booker T. Washington named it, “Black Wall Street”. This community was burned down and lives were taken in 1921. Our series of meta-narratives works to give dignity back to the people of the Greenwood District.

Thread

This meta-narrative visually tells the story of how black women are woven into the fabric of American life. The fabric of America would fall apart without them. On Black Wall Street, two Greenwood Art Project artists lay on an American flag with the words, “Black Lives Matter” beneath them.

From concrete conditions paved in fear, black women artists in Tulsa are rising from the ashes of the 1921 massacre with legacy, lineage, and new life. Brown flowers with amber souls are glowing from Black Wall Street’s nightmare known as racism to provide the possibility of a dream named America.

Greenwood Art Project artists Erica Martez and Kenesha Daniels lay on the American flag that is on the BLM mural. They are transparently being the thread woven into the fabric of what makes the nation strong. These humans are black and they are women and they are artists. This short film hovers above the impact black women artists make in the world through local women in Tulsa. Shortly after the film was made the city decided to erase the mural.

The vocals were provided by Michelle Thibeaux with music composed by Berniss Earl Travis II. Nina Simone's voice rings clear as a declaration of freedom to confront injustice. These women are nudely "being" who they are as a form of protest.

The Black Lives Matter mural may have been erased, but the impact of this film and its message is indelibly marked. History may tell the story of the erasure of the mural but this meta-narrative tells the story of empowerment that can not be erased.

In this fictitious story, a young man returns to ancestral grounds to offer flowers and welcome faith with a prayer of hope. This meta-narrative welcomes an ancestral presence. It liberates the power and story of artists in the Greenwood Art Project.

100 years ago in Greenwood 19-year-old Dick Rowland walked into an elevator car of the Drexel Building operated by a white 17-year-old Sarah Page. In between the first and top floor where Rowland hoped to use the restroom, Sarah screamed and Tulsa changed forever.

The screech unleashed a legion of demons possessed by racial hatred. A cloud of wicked witnesses heard what they needed to turn jealousy into misappropriated justice and perceived malice into murder. What may have been an accidental response to an elevator jolt became the worst of many incidents of racial terrorism in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Home Building

This was the location for our filming with Pastor Jamal Dyer and the subsequent audio recording of his beautiful voice as the soundtrack to the "I'm Building me a Home" meta-narrative.

These entrepreneurs are bravely building something important to the legacy of Black Wall Street. They are building a timeless home for the heart of Black Wall Street.

The fireproof and impenetrable force of entrepreneurship still lives in 2021 despite the brutal massacre of 1921. Inspired by the ancestors and drawn into the future these present-day entrepreneurs fearlessly embody. The new group of entrepreneurs are the choreography of meaning and money. They dance in how they serve the Tulsa community with their goods and services.