Three years ago, Breathe in Color opened its first physical location: a six-foot kiosk within a Railroad Square gallery. Now, the wellness community’s story will be displayed in the latest City Hall Gallery show.
“ When we started, my thought was always, ‘We do creative wellness,” said Teylor Parks, who founded Breathe in Color as she navigated her own mental health and wellbeing in 2021. “If there is something — an idea that we have or an idea that someone else has that falls in the category of art, music, or healing — we’re gonna do it, period.”
The “Black Faces, in Black Spaces” exhibit tells Breathe in Color’s story, curated by Parks and Kosi Sumpter, who joined the project in 2022. The group show features photos from Breathe in Color events, including ones shot by Parks and Sumpter.
There are paintings by the space’s resident artists, and acrylic works by Parks, her mother, and her grandmother. Ceramics created by students in Parks’s elementary school art class will also be on display. It’s a collaborative show that welcomes many artists to share the spotlight, reflective of the space itself.
“To be able to see 80 plus pieces of photography or artwork or ceramics or all these other things we’ve included of Black people just being joyous Black people — it’s not about the stereotypes,” Parks said. “It’s not about the statistics. It’s not trauma dumping on the Black experience. It is quite literally Black joy and creative expression.”
From ‘humble beginnings’ to a warehouse of their own
Parks and Sumpter both grew up in Atlanta and graduated from Florida A&M University. Neither studied art in college — Sumpter majored in industrial engineering and Parks studied business — but both operate with an expansive definition of artistic practice and a desire to create physical and emotional spaces that foster artistic creation.
In 2022, they teamed up to sell Parks’s affirmation cards with messages like “I learn, grow, and evolve constantly” and Sumpter’s immune support system kits, which contained plant-based remedies including honey sticks and ginger. They travelled around the southeast, then established a permanent spot vending out of the kiosk inside the South of Soho gallery in Railroad Square.
“It was like he was healing people physically, and I was trying to heal people emotionally,” Parks said.
By Martin Luther King Day 2023, they expanded from their “humble beginnings,” as Parks and Sumpter call the kiosk, into their own space in Railroad Square.
As soon as Breathe in Color had its own warehouse, they set about making the empty box into a welcoming community space centered on the interconnection between art and wellness. They knew it would be a gallery, a pole dance studio, and an events hub. True to their expansive idea of what an art space could contain, the gallery shows they mounted were art. So were the pole fitness classes Parks taught, and the way Sumpter set up the lights, and the way they operated the business.
“Everything is art,” Parks said. “However you decide to express yourself is art.”
A space for creative expression
Sumpter, an installation artist, recognized that the space needed a focal point and brought in his family’s green 1967 Volkswagen Westfalia van that looks like the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine. He grew up playing in the van with his brothers, and he watched kids walk into the Breathe in Color space and immediately gravitate toward it.
The van was a gallery within the gallery: artists in residence displayed their work on its interior. It also doubled as a safe space within a safe space: people who felt overwhelmed or needed a break from a big gathering would use it as a place to breathe and decompress.
“ Teylor and I really took seriously the buzzword that everybody throws around, safe space,” Sumpter said. “But the thing is, it was just a word. These places didn’t quite literally exist.”
As co-curators of the studio, they built a place that welcomed Black and Brown folks in Tallahassee to experience art and wellness, as practitioners and participants.
“ We were meeting a need,” Parks said. “There was a gap in the community, and the people came out in numbers.”
On a day-to-day basis, that took many forms: an all-ages music venue, a kids’ birthday party play space, a sound bath studio. One day, they got a call from a guy in Miami asking if they had hardwood floors. They did — and the space became a roller skating classroom.
“We might’ve been teaching a pole class on Wednesday, but if something pops up on Thursday and the local homeless shelter says we need to raise donations, well, it looks like that’s what we’re doing now,” Parks said. “That was just how we ran the space.”
Focus on wellness
Accessible wellness is central to the Breathe in Color mission. Parks and Sumpter had noticed how people were being priced out of wellness spaces and art studios around town, and affordability was part of accessibility. No one was turned away from a workshop for not being able to pay. Their Friday night Decompress Express artmaking event frequently had more attendees than supplies.
“ We would run out of canvases, and we would be painting on poster boards,” Sumpter said. “The people would still want to come in and just chill in the space and paint.”
They kept the cost of renting the space low, or let folks use it for free, and became a launch pad for early career yoga instructors, music showcases, and fashion designers who were able to teach their first classes or host an inaugural event without breaking the bank.
The space was also intentional about making mental health resources accessible to the community by incorporating them into the studio’s practice.
“ I knew that if I said, ‘Oh, pull up to a meditation class,’ they might not come for that,” Parks said. “But if I say, ‘Come for pole fitness,’ and then we meditate in the beginning and I have a social worker doing group work at the end — that got the girls into wellness who might have been a little hesitant.”
Some people started showing up just for the therapy session at the end of class. Although Parks had known the girls for months through casual conversation during class, the group therapy conversations illuminated the intertwined physical and mental health challenges they were facing outside the studio.
“ The women were using pole to feel like they were inside of their bodies again,” she said. “It gives me chills just talking about it.”
Breathing creative expression into new places
This year, they moved the studio from the Railroad Square warehouse into a residential home. They retrofitted the space so it’s equipped to host movement classes, workshops, and art-making. (“ Just imagine this room filled with 22 girls making jewelry,” Parks said, gesturing around a space that comfortably sat three for the interview.) Instead of charging a fee, participants brought items to donate to the Kearney Center.
In the future, Breathe in Color could exist in a variety of spaces: as a museum partnership, a community center, a collaboration with a hospital.
“The way that I see Breathe in Color transforming is as an initiative and an education enterprise that helps teach people, no matter what space they’re in,” Sumpter said.
But right now, being in the space of City Hall matters. It’s where decisions that shape Tallahassee are made, and it often feels Black and Brown people are left out of those decisions, Parks said. Now, “before you make any decision in City Hall, you have to walk past Black faces,” she said. “ We’ll never be forgotten.”
If you go
What: Black Faces, In Black Spaces
When: Through Oct. 1
Where: City Hall Art Gallery, 300 S. Adams Street, Main Gallery: 2nd-floor mezzanine
Cost: Free
Contact: 850-224-2500 x6 | info@tallahasseearts.org | View Online Gallery at tallahasseearts.org/online-galleries
Ashira Morris is a guest writer for the Council on Culture & Arts. Celebrating its 40th anniversary, COCA is the capital area’s umbrella agency for arts and culture (tallahasseearts.org).
