CREATIVE PROJECTS

EVERYTHING IS AN IDEA BEFORE IT HAS THE CHANCE TO CAPTIVATE SOMETHING REAL AND INSPIRE IDEAS IN OTHERS. FACILITATING GROWTH IS DIFFICULT, BUT IT IS AMONG THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS WE CAN DO WHILE WE’RE HERE. WHEN WE CAN STREAMLINE OUR IDEAS IN TANGIBLE WAYS THAT LAST BEYOND THE MOMENT? ABSOLUTE MAGIC. CREATION AS SPECTACLE RATHER THAN BY NECESSITY, MAKES CREATION MORE INTEGRAL THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN BEFORE. I AM FOREVER GRATEFUL. ALL CREATIVE PROJECTS HAVE BEEN CONCEPTUALIZED, REALIZED, AND EXECUTED (WITH ASSISTANCE) BY NAJEE AR FAREED. I WOULD LOVE TO GIVE A SPECIAL THANK YOU TO EVERYONE WHO HAS MADE ANY OF THESE PROJECTS COME TO LIFE, I AM NOTHING WITHOUT THE COMMUNITY OF LOVERS, CREATIVES, AND THINKERS I HAVE BUILT AROUND ME.

I find myself wondering if there is an East Atlanta in Heaven, if God has enough space for us. The way it has been presented to me, Heaven at times has small doors and skinny corridors and sharp edges. East Atlanta has been a round, soft, and cerebral community to me for quite some time. I know there is a heaven in East Atlanta. I know it, when I eat wings. I know it when I see, feel, and hear the expression. I know it when I see the beauty. When I see East Atlanta as it has been promised to me, I see a garden. A garden for creativity and intimations of intense investment into the space promised to my people. All life is creation and all creation is art and all artistic processes are prayer. But life is more urgent than art. Life squeezes and intimidates and belabours people until they don’t have the space to live it. Save Zone 6 is not only about fighting gentrification. It is about ensuring equity for everyone, everywhere. Save Zone 6 is about spreading resources until life and art slow into a singular moment in which they can be engaged with. Art, creation, and life holding the same gravity for everyone but starting with my people is my goal. Last time it was about education. This time, being informative wasn’t enough. I needed to explore what Save Zone 6 meant, spiritually. Growth is joy, growth is for everyone and I mean that. I present EAST ATLANTA FAMILY REUNION 2021. SHOT BY RYAN CONSTANTINE.

Whenever I think of blackness, I think of the history behind it and about the fact that I have never been black by myself. I’ve always had someone else right by my side, being black with me. A community. A legacy. At the same time, when I think of black, I think of the future. I think of all the innovations to come. I went into this project with this in mind, a Neo-Futuristic Blaxploitation Exploration. From designing the bodysuits and the simplistic set, I had the work of Gordon Parks in mind. How to be SuperFly... black and brilliant. This is the rambunctious, enchanting, and unapologetic anachronisms that came from it. Influences other than Gordon Parks: Donna Summers, Star Wars, Kill Bill, Diana Ross, The Fifth Element, Missy Elliot, Pam Grier, Haruki Murakami, The Blade Runner, Prince, and the color black itself. Thank you to the void, it gives us our depth in space. Presenting, “SuperFly in Deep Space.” SHOT BY IDRIS ABDULLAH

“Here I am, here I am, here I am.” “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.” - Kurt Vonnegut, Sirens of Titan. 

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The man on the frontier isn’t the same man as the one at home. He isn’t the same man as he was on the road, he isn’t the same man as he will be at the end that will never come. The man has had many names: Jonah, Odysseus, nigga, Malachi Constant. The list goes on. Life is a series of accidents and fighting what’s intended for you, running from the whale, will do you no good. Everything that’s meant to come will come. Temptation will take you to the belly of the whale. Desire will take you to the belly of the whale. Envy will take you to the belly of the whale. Freedom will take you to the belly of the whale. The biggest trouble in realizing that is finding the point in it all and embracing the agency you have within that prophecy. We’re living for each other, loving whoever is around to be loved. The man in the moonlight series has signified many things to me and my plight as a black man, chief among them, a desire to be softened and illuminated by dark light rather than swallowed by it. Every siren has the same lie, telling us that the whale won’t come for us. But I know that’s wrong. Here I am, on the whale, so glad I’m here. Influences include Kurt Vonnegut, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, Moonlight, 2001: A Space Odyssey, “Siren Song” by Margaret Atwood, Bisa Butler, The Truman Show, “Acque Pericolose” by Basquiat, Surah Al-Saffat Ayah 137-148, and many more. Siren Denim designed by me for NAN COUTURE HOUSE. Shot by CHINEDU NWAKUDU.

When I was a kid, wrestling was my favorite thing for a minute. Moving to Atlanta, no cable, Friday Night Smack Down was one of the main things I could look forward to after a long week. And I kinda drifted away from it through the years even as I kept an eye out for results and PPVs and the like. Artists have two roles in society: to admit that they can’t straighten out the whole universe and to make one little part of the universe exactly how it should be. Last year, when Kobe died, it was the same day as the 2020 Royal Rumble. Watching Edge make his surprise return was legitimately the only thing that made me smile. It made me remember how much I love that silly shit and I want to honor that. Plus, I always wanted to design a vintage wrestling tee. I took major inspiration from WWF Attitude Era aesthetics and maintained the motif of fighting Gentrification in East Atlanta and saving Zone 6. Gucci Mane’s Ice Cream tattoo picture is as iconic and symbolic of East Atlanta as anything I’ve ever seen. This is the culture we’re fighting for. 2021 we piledriving, body slamming, and DDTing gentrifiers. Shoutout to the Save Zone 6 Tag Team, we are doing this by committee. One little part by one little part, we make the community as it should as community. We do it with the things we love. And we do it, by fighting for more of the things we love. “ROYAL RUMBLE, SAVE ZONE 6” mini capsule, out now via Nan Couture House. Shot by IDRIS ABDULLAH. Polaroids shot by NAJEE AR FAREED.

The inspirations for the Save Zone 6 campaign have been thoroughly explained on many pages on the site. Gentrification has been ravaging my home at an alarming rate and I feel a responsibility to do something about it. Creatively and conceptually, I had two distinct inspirations. Family reunion tee shirts and Freaknik tee shirts. East Atlanta has been a home to me and much of the community has wrapped itself around me akin to family.

2020 was a difficult year for my family. My grandfather passed away in March. In my adolescence, I used to go to family reunion’s every summer in my parents’ hometown of Kansas City. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were not allowed to congregate for a family reunion, regardless of how badly I wanted to do so. I looked over old family photos from our 2009 iteration of the Hazziez family reunion and our tee shirts shone out to me in it’s vibrancy. The tee featured a screen-printed image of everyone in the family. We all wore one. It was a strong showing of solidarity and I wanted that to shine through just as strongly in my desire to unite East Atlanta. It was important to me that the family of East Atlanta was congregating somewhere comfortable and recognizable to anyone from the area. Unable to be there for my family the way I desired, I wanted to design a way to be there for them in other ways.

Freaknik began in the early 1980s, organized by black college students from the AUC. It grew in notoriety in the early 1990s, becoming an annual draw for black spring breakers as they migrated to the City of Atlanta for the opportunity to be party and simply be black amongst black. It grew year after year. In 1996; 250,000 Black people made a pilgrimage to Atlanta for Freaknik. Freaknik wasn’t a contained event like a concert, party, festival, or parade but somehow a mixture of the four. Freaknik spilled out into the streets and for what its worth, demanded the blackness of the city of Atlanta to be seen and addressed. But it didn’t come without any drawbacks. The first of which: the City of Atlanta, home of the civil rights movement, wasn’t eager to host Freaknik despite the influx of tourism and business it brought every year. One reason that was cited was the gross levels of rape, sexual assault, and sexual abuse reported at the hands of predators preying on women looking to have a good time at Freaknik. However, unfortunately, that was not the key reason. Another reason is that the city was still reeling from the Rodney King riots but the biggest was that white people simply ain’t want niggas inconveniencing THEIR city. THEIR Black Mecca. In that respect, Freaknik was party as protest. Chaotic, unhinged, carefree, pure, black punk. Niggas was taking up space and stepping out of those capitalistic daily processes in order to experience themselves and to experience black joy on a large scale. Freaknik ended in 1999. Atlanta has never been a Black Mecca. The cancellation of Freaknik was a reaction against Atlanta being a black haven. I wish to make good on the promise of “a city too busy to hate,” to make Atlanta the city it never was. A city for a landless people, a city for us.

To be a part of a community, is to give something of yourself in hopes of being something greater than what you could be on your own. For a while, East Atlanta has been that for many black people. It has been a place to live, to thrive, to grow, and to experience culture. Community is family. And that family is in trouble. Gentrification is a loss of culture and an influx of wealth and whiteness. Gentrification is a concerted effort by the city and developers to re-orient its purpose from being a space to provide for the people into being a space to generate money for the rich. The creation of wealth being prioritized over the creation of community. Growth is natural and healthy but there has to be a way to grow equitably without damaging the roots of the spaces we’ve become accustomed to. NAN Couture House is all about building community and it is important to save what we have while doing it. That is the meaning behind the SAVE ZONE 6 campaign. Inspired by both the ATL Freaknik Tee Shirts of the past and Family Reunion style tees, this is knowledge as protest. This is education as protest. This is art as protest. This is joy as protest. This is anger as protest. This is standing up, drawing a line, and deciding that our homes and our sweat and our potential is worth saving. We have put far too much into our streets to lose them now. What am I... without going to Club Technics in High School, without riding the 15 Bus Route down Candler Rd, without hooping at Gresham Park, without blasting March Madness? What the fuck am I without lemon pepper wings? East Atlanta has made me who I am. I hope to return the favor by giving it all I have. To fight gentrification is to make a stand against the violent process of making black people a landless people. East Atlanta would be East Atlanta anywhere in the world, but why lose what we’ve built? Zone 6, Nigga Paris, Black Mecca, a Family, the Final Frontier. SHOT BY IDRIS ABDULLAH.

The “IMMORTAL” series started with a poem, inspired by a throwaway phrase I wrote in my notebook during my sophomore year of college. Mantra of the butterfly, “I AM NEW. I AM GOOD.” My poetry professor told me that all poetry is about two things: sex and death. In this instance, I was definitely grappling with mortality but not under the pretense of finality. Death as a beginning, life as an art, living as living. Living for being. 2020 was a year plagued with death and despair. I really wanted to unpack and dissect the ways that the passed are still among us. Memories are a life-force. With them, I am not sure if anything ever really dies. Death & Rebirth. Death & Rebirth. Death & Rebirth. We remember it all, even when we don’t. Memory is being. Our daily processes are learned behavior. Our ideologies, our loves, our passions. It all begins and ends begins again in someone or something else, over and over again. On and on.

In the case of the “IMMORTAL” series, it began with Ana Mendieta. Ana Mendieta was a Cuban photographer and painter, mainly active in the early 1970s. The graphic is an excerpt from a series of photos she did, Self-Portrait with Blood (1973), and it always struck me as gruesome and beautiful. The way the blood drags and clogs and drips and stains... it looks like her skin is going inside itself and making itself new. Her scars, her bruises will heal. And she is new and good, just as she always is. That’s where the beauty comes from for me, the recognition that we are constantly evolving and becoming better versions of ourselves. The hope that we feel when charged with being new, that is when we become like the butterfly. The freedom comes from change and creation, not simply from being released from the bondage of chrysalis. When we put this feeling into our passions, we are always new and we are always good even after we are no longer here.

We remember Kobe (2020). We remember my Grandfather (2020). We remember Breonna Taylor (2020). We remember Trayvon Martin (2012). Chadwick Boseman (2020). MF DOOM (2020). Ahmaud Arberry (2020). Philando Castille (2016). Sandra Bland (2015). Kennedy Pruval (2020). Jihad Abdur-Rahman (2013). Ana Mendieta (1984). To look out the window and feel as the butterfly does wonders for the spirit. Legacy will live longer than our blood and we will remain new. We live forever. IMMORTAL TEES by me for NAN Couture House. SHOT BY IDRIS ABDULLAH.

This was a labor of love, something I was nervous about. Every graphic was handcrafted. I initially conceptualized these shirts for Juneteenth and after the racial re-awakening caused from George Floyd’s murder, I didn’t know if it was the right time. I didn’t want to feel as if I was profiting off of black turmoil or be another voice contributing to " woke clothes" in order to get a quick buck. But I remembered who I was and how important my people are to me, black men and black women and all in-between. I remembered what NAN Couture House stands for and how we’ve been on the woke tip. It’s art, it’s handmade, it’s important to me. No shirt is perfect, each shirt has its own flaw. But each one is special and made with my people in mind. Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating the emancipation of black people from the shackles of chattel slavery. However, the legacy of the black community goes far beyond slavery and our troubles, even as they extend into today. Blackness needs to celebrated for what is, beauty.

The NOT YOUR MULE series took heavy inspiration from the blaxploitation era, specifically using images of Pam Grier as Coffy and Azizi Johara. The NOT YOUR MULE series was primarily focused on flexing the power, influence, and resolve of black women. Zora Neale Hurtson had once wrote, “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” The white man put his troubles on the black man and the black man put his troubles on the black woman; the black woman remains responsible for carrying it all. This intersection of race and gender is met with unresolved racism and misogyny that afflicts black women from all angles. By asserting that black women are not our mules, I am attempting to say that black women are so much more. The black woman owes us no responsibility and deserve to exist and live. Live in luxury, live in their peace, live in their truth. Everything that flows through and forth, comes from the black woman, the original woman.

The WE REAL COOL series was heavily inspired by writings from Bell Hooks, where she details the many ways in which black men are the envy, the foil, and the savior of our respective worlds. Bell Hooks, wrote about this phrase in response to a book titled, The Envy of The World: On Being a Black Man in America by Ellis Cose. Ellis Cose himself, had lifted the phrase from Toni Morrison’s Sula. The source of this envy stems from desire and hate. Every black man toes the line between expression and repression; whether it’s due to fear, pride, or anger. The silhouette represents the lower desires that we repress, even while our expression remains coveted by all others. The vices in which we participate, these lower activities of visibility exist in us all. Richard Wright’s Native Son details the life of young black man living in Chicago named Bigger Thomas. Bigger Thomas struggles with his identity and lives in constant fear of the consequences of his actions, actions that are constantly defined by those around him rather than from himself. James Baldwin had once asserted that all black men have an inner Bigger Thomas. From Ali to Tupac to Jordan to Malcom X. The Silhouette is the visual embodiment of the envy of others as well as the shadow that cloaks us all.

My influences were widespread. Names I find myself screaming to the rafters: James Baldwin, Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Marvin Gaye, Zora Neale Hurston, Gordon Parks, Lauryn Hill, Funkadelic, Jericho Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Tupac, Kendrick Lamar, Toni Morrison, NWA, Pam Grier, and anyone else who have made me feel proud to black. All black lives matter, even the ones who wear all-white Fila disruptors. SHOT BY JAMIAH ZHANE.