Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre hosted its third annual “That Art Thing We Do” panel with Black Evanston artists at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center on Saturday. The event invited vocalist and author Dejah Gomez, textile artist and writer Melissa Blount and designer and letterpress printer Ben Blount to explore drawing inspiration and support from the Evanston community. 

Gomez, who grew up in Evanston but had residencies and tours around the U.S. and the globe, recently decided to settle back in the city.

“I’ve been focused on building community,” Gomez said. “This is it happening now. It’s emerging.”

Gomez added she hopes to encourage and inspire “authenticity.” She said that amplifying voices from Evanston’s Black community in turn amplifies everyone’s voices.

Gomez first embraced singing as a child after her school librarian recommended she join the Second Baptist Church youth choir. 

“It changed my life. Second Baptist was where I learned the gift that I was given and where I was fully supported in being in my full authentic voice,” Gomez said. “I felt loved, I felt supported, I felt seen, recognized. I felt heard.”

Since then, she has worked on “paying it forward” by showing others the love she received from mentors growing up.

The Evanston community is also what drew Ben Blount to art. He had attended graduate school to learn to print letterpress but didn’t start regularly making art until he and Melissa Blount, a married couple, moved to Evanston in 2014.

“Just getting involved with the community was what made this feel like home,” Ben Blount said.
“And so when I started making work on a regular basis, it just made sense to share it with the community, look at the community for content and ideas, and so I feel like my artistic beginning is tied to Evanston, and it just feels like that’s the way it happened.”

One of Ben Blount’s early projects was redesigning Black Lives Matter signs and shirts and distributing them around the city. He explained the reason he began making art in Evanston was that he believes it’s a small city where people are “open to new ideas and change.” 

Ben Blount hopes his art helps viewers “feel something.”

“I want to surprise or anger or enrage or move people to action, even if the action is thinking about something they haven’t thought of, or thinking differently about something, having a conversation,” Ben Blount said. 

Another one of his projects was a calendar that listed all the names of the Black men who were murdered in Chicago in 2014, paying tribute to them and documenting state violence. 

However, his project didn’t include Black women, prompting Melissa Blount to explore the intersection of race, gender and class in state violence through a piece called “Black Lives Matter Witness Quilt,” which was displayed at the event. 

She found the research “devastating” and looked for ways to generate more uplifting narratives about Black women to “celebrate our realness.”

The initiative inspired her to create another piece titled “ABCs of Black Girl Magic,” in which she highlighted different Black women from history and contemporary times from A to Z. 

“That was a remarkable project because I knew Black women were amazing, but I just didn’t know the scope of Black women’s brilliance, and the brilliance of Black women here in Evanston was amazing,” Melissa Blount said. “So it wasn’t just tragedy, it was brilliance.”

Artistic Director of Fleetwood-Jourdain Theatre Tim Rhoze, one of the event’s planners, said he chose different local artists to highlight pieces that “fall under that huge umbrella we call the arts.”

“For those who are coming to attend this, I just want them to get to know these artists who are right here in our own backyard, creating some phenomenal things,” he said. “These are creative unicorns. They’re just brilliant in their own right.” 

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