BLKMRKTCLT is celebrating our 4th anniversary and instead of a party to celebrate our growth and success this year, we have chosen to celebrate Jessica Dunston, Mara Robbin, Kalin Devone, Jamea Marlowe, Jamila Brown and Wabwila Mugala throughout July 2021. In early 2020, we had the idea to promote Black women creatives but then the pandemic hit and everything was placed on pause. Fast forward to 2021, we have decided to approach this idea again and turn it into reality. With the help of Carla Aaron-Lopez, aka iamkingcarla, we want to recognize the growth of these amazing women artists.

Jamila Brown is a photographic mixed media artist based in North Carolina. Her work digs through layers of Self and an ancestral guidance amidst the realities they inhabit. Using various methods, including writing, painting and fibers, the work delves into delicate complexities that seek a reckoning with what is both apparent on the surface and what lies hidden beneath.

Wabwila Mugala is a mixed media artist born in Zambia and currently based in North Carolina. Having moved often during her early life, her work explores the ways we navigate inside and outside of cultures. Her work reconciles with defining her own lived experience, her own culture without guilt and imposed identity that comes with existing in-between communities.