By: Tamia Fowlkes
On a rare, snowy February afternoon, soon-to-be two-time Academy Award winner Ruth Carter nestled into an intricately decorated corner of her California home and hopped onto a Zoom call. Flashing onto the screen with her small Black dog in tow and walls lined with African art, she joyfully greeted Tayleur Crenshaw and Xavier Henderson, two California-based creatives who lead the organizations Gold Beams and SoulfulofNoise. Eventbrite brought the three creators together with Blavity for a conversation on community, creativity and collaboration in the arts.
Carter, best known for her costume design for films such as Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther franchise, serves as a driving voice in the fashion design and arts community. Over the course of her career, Carter has received a variety of accolades and awards celebrating her work. They include four Oscar nominations for 1992’s Malcolm X, and 1997’s Amistad. As a designer, she has used her work in textiles as a mechanism to explore race, culture and politics through clothing. With each piece, Carter aims to provide context for the cultural and historical moments explored in each project.
Gold Beams and SoulfulofNoise are arts organizations that seek to inform, educate and empower community members through artistic performance and expression. Both organizations built their brands through Eventbrite and continued their growth with the platform since.
SoulfulofNoise was founded by husband and wife Xavier Henderson and Lynisha Hyche in 2016. In the seven years since their launch, the duo has brought together over 20,000 people for live band performances, open mics and festivals highlighting local Black-owned businesses. They boast one of the largest open mic events in the country with their signature #SoulfulSunday program.
Gold Beams, founded by Crenshaw in 2018, curates eclectic events and productions for Black creatives. Their signature event, Second Mondays, started as a small group hangout among Crenshaw’s friends in her apartment and transformed into crowds of over 3,000 presenting an array of Black art and “ethereal Communion.” The organization provides a creative hub and open mic for Black artists through panels, parties, galleries, talk sessions, and workshops centering on the Black community.
Blavity spoke with Carter, Crenshaw and Henderson ahead of the 2023 Oscars Ceremony to discuss how their community and culture influenced their creative passions and desire to bring others into the fold. Their conversation has been edited and condensed for this article.
Blavity: Can you all share the origins of your creative journey? How did you make your space in your respective industries?
Crenshaw: I’m from Westchester, New York, I lived in DC, where I went to Howard, but when I moved to Oakland, I didn’t know anybody. I was like, wow, I had to make adult friends, and culturally, I was dealing with new things like corporate culture. I got really in my feels and wrote a poem one day called, “Am I Crazy,” and I was finally like, ‘I’m gonna spit these bars.’ I got bold enough to ask some people to come over to my house, some underground creatives and poets I’d met in the city, ordered some pizza and bought a bunch of Trader Joe’s wine, and it started to become its own community. Eventually, it was 50 people in my apartment. I started telling everybody to come share your art, whether it’s a journal, whether it’s a song, whether it’s a clip, you want us to see like, let’s just do it. Ever since then, we’ve built a beautiful space and events where we bond over real human things that we’re all thinking and feeling and have a good time.
Henderson: My wife and I started SoulfulofNoise after we started dating. For my entire life, I’ve had a beautiful loving environment. My parents they both raised my brother and I with so much love that I got to see what that could do. It’s like having magical powers where you’re able to change somebody else’s life with your actions, thoughts and feelings and my wife was raised the same way. When we created it, we wanted it to be an extension of our family accepting other people. Our first events were a free festival on skid row. In the midst of doing that, it became a beacon of hope, bringing people together with music and fellowship. So, people started coming for that. We’ve done almost 300 events in a bunch of different states.
Carter: I’m a costume designer of 35-plus years. When I started in this industry I really wanted to tell our stories and being as authentic as I could, but I also wanted to be joyous because I wasn’t seeing representation on screen. I met I had been reading the work of Black playwrights and poets since I was a young girl; our community embraced me and guided me to be curious and conscious about the world around me. So, once I became a storyteller within film and got together with Spike Lee and other filmmakers like him, we were like-minded. We wanted to bring that aesthetic to the film, and I’ve been passionate about that ever since.
Blavity: What were some of the challenges you encountered while you evolved your work and brand?
Crenshaw: When Second Mondays started at my house, I was doing the texting method. Just mass texting and feeling annoying. And it’s so annoying. I was copying and pasting and sending, like 50 times, and I couldn’t keep track of whether or not people could come. I wondered often if anyone would even come. Having the Eventbrite was a part of creating foundation for the brand where like people can go and see pictures, upcoming events and our contact information. It was super hard for me to learn everything from scratch, so being a connector is really important to me. For all of the artists who want to share their work, I don’t want it to be as struggle for them to thrive and share their talent.
Carter: I had come out of a lot of theater experience and internships after my time at Hampton University, but I didn’t really feel like I was climbing my way up from the bottom. I remember one week, working over 40 hours and looking at my paycheck and it was only a little over $200. I had a lot of experience, but when I came out into the professional world, I was starting all over again from scratch, dealing with race relations and unconscious bias. But when Spike came into my world, there was no question about it, that I was the costume designer. He let the studio executives know exactly what I needed and that empowered me to make sure I did everything in my power to make him proud. All that I had learned and all I had that I had done to get to this point reminded me that I had earned it. But I also wanted to help other people get there as well.
Blavity: The arts and culture space, though often pushed forward by Black creatives, has not always been the safest or most welcoming space for our community. What or who made you feel as if you had the capacity to exist and thrive in this industry?
Henderson: People showed up who needed that good positive Black experience that wasn’t Hollywood, where they didn’t need to worry about what they were wearing or if their hair was ‘appropriate.’ We were not trying to build a network of people dedicated to blank causes that are only transactional, that only show up when there’s a dollar to be made, but show up when there’s a lack or something that needs to be saved, somebody to encourage, somebody to remind that it’s OK to be hurt. That’s what our organization stands for. Music is the candy, but the love of community is the medicine that is infused in what we do.
Blavity: What do you hope your work can leave behind for your community? Do you have a dream or vision of what you hope it can contribute to?
Carter: I think back to the sneaker jams Spike Lee would have in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn during our first few films. Before we would start our film, we’d have a big street fair and barbecue with in the neighborhood we were in, not wanting to infiltrate, but wanted to let them know that we were also being sensitive to their needs. Every film was started that way, with a community spirit. We would bring Jesse Jackson to our first day and form this big circle, have prayer and bless the film before we started. We would have internships, production assistants that were hired or the lady who was struggling with her crack addiction, she would come and pick up the bottles off of our set. We were not only filmmakers, but we were community builders. The community knew our names and we didn’t shy away from it. We encouraged them to be a part of our experience. It’s something that lives within you.
Blavity: Your work centers very centrally on camaraderie and collaboration with other creatives. What have you learned from helping other people bring their creative vision to life?
Carter: I’ve done a few films with the same actors, Sam Jackson, Eddie Murphy, and, sometimes, it’s the director and the actors that call me and make me feel excited about a particular project. I wish I could say that I have a stack of scripts here that I’m looking through and trying to decide which one I can do. But, I’ve been asked to do a lot of different things, you know, B.A.P.S. was completely different from Malcolm X. It’s kind of like cleansing your palette, getting away from something for a second and going into another genre is exciting. I’ve been very lucky that people see me as someone who does research and gets into the depth of a character and can really bring out a world and I do get offered those kinds of movies.
Crenshaw: It is so liberating to 1000%. just exhale it all out and be yourself. With our events, it feels so at home and so comfortable. When artists on stage, there is not only space for people to come and listen but they are also coming in and making great friends and networking with like great people. It’s all Black, and we don’t even have to talk about the ailments of the world because we know, they exist. It’s truly my goal to just cater to them and give people beautiful times. So, when people feel comfortable enough to continue to break out their shell, especially in front of like an audience, oh my god, like, that’s the safety right there. That’s the evolution of this work.
Henderson: This is a vibration that has already existed since the very beginning of time, and all we are is conduits. We’re just participants in something positive, that’s all. So it’s just a privilege, to be able to be selected to be able to help people heal through community and music. But not we don’t have a monopoly on that. I feel like you can go anywhere in the world, you could find that in every Black church, in any low juke joint, in the people playing music on the street. If you go sit and listen to a musician pour their heart out and listen for 20 minutes, you can start to feel something inside of you too.
