Current and former students gathered on Feb. 18 to take part in Emporia State’s Black Student Union Artist Showcase. The event, held each year, spotlights various Black students and artists who want to display their talents.
ESU alumnus Josiah Driggers, who graduated in 2024, does sports photography as a hobby while working as a project manager for Malibu Creative. Driggers often photographs ESU sports and his work has been featured in ESU Athletics content.
“It’s an outlet for me,” said Driggers at the showcase. “I would say I enjoy it because it allows me to escape and do something different, even if my daily job is still photo, video, commercials, this is something different. It’s a way to show the world around in a different way, and freeze time, if you will.”
Within the hour that the showcase ran for, three people performed for the crowd: a music producer from Kansas City, Matthew Calhoun, a freshman singer at ESU, Savemore Nyamakope and BSU Co-President Delazis Smith.
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Calhoun played two of his unreleased songs and Nyamakope sang “A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke. Smith read a poem from Kendrick Lamar’s album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” He recounted how much Lamar changed his outlook on therapy and self-judgement.
“I would say one of the reasons that I want to change is because of (Lamar),” Smith said. “He showed me that you might start in a bad place, but, you know, that’s not your whole story. He inspired me, especially getting through struggle and speaking out on it as well.”
Fellow BSU Co-President Cellina Guidry, shared why it’s important to put on art shows like the BSU Artist Showcase at colleges like ESU.
“I feel like this is an important time, especially within what the world is currently going through,” said Guidry. “Just like, ‘hey, what, what can we do to help, not just the Black community, but help everyone to come together and have a good time?’ Like, this is a type of situation or a type of moment where everyone can get out of their head, get out of homework, get out of stress and just use this to decompress and learn like, wow, college is actually fun without doing homework everyday.”
When asked about the collaborative environment the art showcase opened up, Smith expanded on the importance of having events like it at a time where he says Black culture and history are actively being erased.
“African American culture is full of resilience, and they’re trying to keep it set up as, ‘if this history is not there, no one will ever think that resilience can come,’” he said. “That’s what’s going on with these ICE raids, all this other stuff, and then they don’t have that history, they’ll (be) like, ‘this never happened before, how can it happen now?’ But it has shown that African Americans have been resilient through all the stuff, all the redlining and slavery, and we’re still powering through with joy.”
One of the most important parts of art to Smith is how much it can show who people are. Through someone’s expression and enjoyment of art, he said you get to understand who a person is, through and through.
“You don’t ever know unless you listen to art, you see art, you listen to music. Art explains you in many different ways,” said Smith. “That’s why I love it so much. It’s part of our culture, and it’s supposed to be spread out. We invite people to do it, we want everybody to feel the joy that we have.”
