![Black Portraiture[s]](https://www.blackportraitures.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Black_Portraitures_Logo_full_color_light_type-2.svg){kind=logo}
What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.
—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965
Anya Wallace
Anya M. Wallace, a PhD candidate in Art Education and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University is an artist-scholar-—with visual art concentration in black and white craft photography and painting. Her artwork and scholarship are shaped by desire to visually narrate the stories of Black girlhood. She has worked in the service of girls through program and curriculum development with the Girl Scouts of the USA and recently as the Director of MOCA, North Miami’s Women on the Rise! outreach program for girls. She is the founder of The Vibrator Project a creative space designed to investigate young Black women and girls’ self-knowledge of about sex, sexuality, and pleasure. Her artistry extends to the kitchen– a site of her own pleasure– where she conjures the memories, oral histories, and visual narratives of her ancestral connections in tasty dishes. And this, she names photographic taste.
Penn State University, Ph.D. Candidate