The Black Arts Collective is a group of Black artists on campus that come together to think about the world around us and create our responses to it. Across various mediums including painting, dance, sculpture, photography, and film, we have established a generational conversation within shared frameworks. We have notoriously avoided institutionalization and a formal mission as the identity of the space tends to evolve with membership. The Collective was born in 2022 and since has held numerous internally curated exhibitions including anticulation (2022), AFROBUBBLEGUN (2023), and A Thousand Brackish Channels (2024). This edition in collaboration with the Nassau Weekly provides an amazing opportunity to give our writers a space to present work within our newest conversation: A Cacophony of Swallows in Flight (2025).

A Cacophony of Swallows in Flight emerges from its predecessor, A Thousand Brackish Channels. Featuring 15 artists from the Black Arts Collective, this new show meditates on the macro-concept of ancestral intelligence. Our journey mimics that of the swallow—one of the few species to migrate between Africa and the Americas. We understand our position in the now not linearly, but multi-temporally, overlapping with ancestral microhistories. Our responses to the now vary, but are connected through our ancestral intelligence, an archive of all collectively owned black knowledge. We exist as anachronistic examples of our psychological and spiritual proximity to generations prior. Mirroring these ideas, this show is a loud and chaotic movement forward. It is the deafening flutter of hundreds of swallows’ wings making a journey embedded in ancestral memory. This chaos is not a senseless disorder because ours is a percolating identity that can be dated at any point in history.