Beginning artist Nadia launches her new website with the introduction of her Black History A to Z series. With this series, the artist has created a word art aesthetic that she hopes will be appreciated by both art collectors and historians alike. Using acrylic paint on canvas, the artist takes inspiration from stencil, word, and pop artists of the past to hopefully spark conversations about the names in history we know well, the ones we only hear once a year, and the ones we never hear, but should.

The series is a very personal one, as it is inspired by the artist’s own relationship with both history and art. All of Nadia’s art pieces have been influenced by her life and love. Yet, the Black History A to Z series has the most complex back story. In a way, you could say the series has been decades in the making. It was inspired by her love of history and words, her desire to always be a teacher, and memories from her childhood.

Multi-generational Love of History

“I inherited my love of history from my father. We are a family of talkers, and history and politics were often discussed at home. Fast forward to adulthood, and for a brief period, I even taught U.S. History at a high school when I was a long-term substitute teacher just after my son was born. I seem to have passed on that love of history to my son, who is now a history major in college. So, it was no stretch of the imagination that my art would include history in some way.”

Nadia has been an informal student of history all her life and an education professional most of her career. When deciding to funnel her creative energies into visual arts, she wanted to create art that educated and inspired. “I have always loved words. I’m one of those persons who has favorite words. There is the saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I love how one word can also evoke an entire story, like quixotic, or damascene. One cannot read or hear these words without thinking of Don Quixote tilting at windmills or Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. The words are made more eloquent from the stories that gave them their meaning.”

With her word art, Nadia hopes to not only evoke memories but to spark curiosity. “I believe there is power in the listing of words on a canvas, in that they can either ignite a memory or arouse curiosity. Remembrance if one recognizes the word, curiosity to learn more if one does not.”

It was the artist’s memory from childhood and her love of history and words that all combined and took their natural metamorphosis to become the Black
History A to Z series.

Nadia has had no formal training in art but has always been exposed to art from the time of her childhood: from an aunt who was an artist and helped Nadia create her first art piece, to her father taking her and her siblings to art museums and shows. Nadia learned of the impact and importance of individuals channeling their creativity into a tangible medium. Yet, the art experience that most impacted the Black History A to Z series occurred in middle school.

Sister Corita Kent and the Middle-schooler

“In a way, this series has been brewing in me since I was a pre-teen. As a middle schooler, I remember going on a class trip to an exhibit of pop artist Sister Corita Kent. It was a showing of one of her alphabet silkscreen series. Sister Corita was an ardent supporter of public schools and education and donated several of her works.  Some of those works ended up being exhibited in our school.

While I do not remember which of the alphabet art pieces ended up displayed at Phillis Wheatley Middle School in Roxbury, Massachusetts, I do remember the feeling of being exposed to fine art in this way. I remember the experience of walking down the hall and seeing real art in our school. It has stayed with me all these years. I can only hope that perhaps some of my art might end up in a school or two and inspire another generation of young people.”

About the Series

Inspired by Sister Corita, Nadia knew she wanted to create her own alphabet series one day. “Having no formal art training and an inability to draw well, I decided that stencils would be my technique of choice and necessity. My connecting theme would be Black History.”

The first versions of the Black History A to Z series consists of twenty-six plus (26+) 16 by 20-inch canvases. Each canvas takes a letter from the alphabet and list names, events, places, and important speeches from Black History.

While the canvases are small, the work behind them was vast. The first step in her process was doing research to create the lists of words for each letter of the alphabet. As one can imagine, some letters produced more words than others.

With her preliminary research in hand, like any good teacher, Nadia first had to be a good student and sought out those who would help her to create the stencils she would need to create the art pieces. She joined NextFab in Wilmington, Delaware. “I joined NextFab and learned how to use a Roland laser printer to cut the stencils. Part of the education was learning that the software used to ‘talk’ to the laser printer was Adobe Illustrator®. So, I had to teach myself Illustrator®”

“I must have downloaded every stencil font that Adobe Illustrator® has. Through trial and error and quite a few YouTube videos, I taught myself some basic Illustrator® techniques and figured out which stencil fonts and sizes would work the best.” That too involved trial and error as Nadia learned that just because it looked good in Illustrator®, didn’t mean it created a usable stencil when cut on a laser printer.

“There were stencil fonts that did not cut well, and then there were stencils that did not work well when it was time to spray paint them, so I had to redo the laser cut in a different font or increase the font size. I learned which fonts I loved, and which ones would be the bane of my existence and I would never use again. Like many artists, I have had to completely repaint a few canvases when I was not happy with a composition, or I made a mistake. But throughout the process, there were some mishaps that I kept in the painting because it seemed appropriate. History in general is messy, is replete with mistakes and errors. Therefore, I thought, not all the canvases should be ‘perfect’ or at least my biased idea of what perfect meant. I started to embrace the smudges, splatters and oversprays.”

Nadia used these smaller canvases to learn and improve her stenciling technique. She set and attained her goal of getting at least one canvas per letter of the alphabet done. For some letters she had to split the words into several canvases. She is now expanding to larger canvases, which will allow her to fit all the words for each letter on one canvas. Furthermore, larger canvases shall include more names and events that were missing from the first run of the series, as she does more history research and is better informed by historians and history-related organizations with whom she hopes to communicate. “My hope is that I will have communication and collaboration with various Black History museums and organizations who will help expand my knowledge and therefore add to future art pieces.”

What’s Next?

In these next iterations of the series, the artist shall not only use new canvas sizes, but also additional techniques such as mixed media and collage. Nadia is continuing to create other series, is welcoming commission requests, and is adding new names and historical events to the Black History A to Z series.

In addition, her hope is to create an art show event that would combine visual art, spoken word, and a video component. By having individuals available to function as docents, to educate attendees on names they may not be familiar with, the event becomes more interactive than the usual art show. Likewise, the attendees would have an opportunity to have input into the next iterations of the series. They can let the artist know of other names and events that might have been missed.

About Nadia

Nadine Owens Burton, aka Nadia, has spent her career in education: from early childhood education as a Head Start Director, to a high school teacher of statistics and history, to admissions and student affairs at the college level. Her life has been about uplifting others through education. Through her creative, entrepreneurial, and artistic pursuits, she wishes to inspire as well as inform. Her goal is always innovative storytelling, and the mediums she seeks to use to tell her, and others’ stories include books, speeches, and now, the visual arts. Her education in Sociology — with an emphasis in race and ethnicity as well as sex and gender — and her love of history inform her artistic work.

For the past fifteen-plus years, Ms. Owens Burton has been an education and speaking entrepreneur, as the president of Owens Burton Consulting. She has created three proprietary quality improvement themes: What Color Is Your Imagination?, The Power of CARE, and The Promising Professional. She has published her first book, What Color Is Your Imagination? © and plans to publish at least two other non-fiction books based on the other themes, as well as several works of fiction she is developing.

Related:  Glenn Ligon, Christopher Wool, Mel Bochner, Sister Corita Kent

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