Creative Space Incubator

The Creative Space Incubator is a BIPOC process based artist working group in Durham, North Carolina. The Incubator was developed as a space for BIPOC Durham based artist to be in extended creative process alongside one another without centering a final product. This iteration of the Creative Space Incubator took place over the span of six months, March 2024 - August 2024, and was geared towards artists creating in conversation with Black Feminist Theory. The Incubator met monthly at Peoples Solidarity Hub, received weekly in person creative space at Radical Healing, and held a culminating works in process showing in September 2024 at The Ark Dance Studio.

The culminating group show featured works by each of the artists as well invited guest artist, Ayan Felix, who performed with artists Amari Jones and Kahlila Brown.

The 2024 Creative Space Incubator was directly supported by Durham Arts Council.

Creative Space Incubator Artists

  • JAC M.

    cotton candy enthusiast / pro Palestinian advocate / poet / sad girl with IBS

    Link to JAC M.’s work Wonderpuff IG

  • Free

    Free is a sacred ritualist, embodied healing artist and intuitive embroiderer. Drawing inspiration from her life, pain, dream wisdom, fears and desires, her art is imbued with a presence and vulnerability forged by her unfolding healing journey. By heeding ancestral guidance, she creates healing experiences that invite personal and communal  intergenerational healing. As a queer black woman and sexual trauma survivor, her art is a direct reflection of her path to self-reclamation  through conjure and ritual.

  • Medusa

    I've been creating multi media art since I was younger, but recently allowed myself to create without the pressure for it to be perfect within the past couple of years. I am grateful to connect with fellow creatives in Durham and looking forward to watering my creative garden more in these next few years. 

    Link to Medusa’s work @artthroughmylens7

  • Dr. Della V. Mosley

    Dr. Della V. Mosley co-creates healing and wellness as the founder of Blafemme Healing and The WELLS Healing Center. They have been facilitating Black and QTBIPOC healing spaces for 15 years. Connect with them on Instagram @dvmosley or visit www.DellaVMosley.com.

  • King Sage

    King (he/him) is an interdisciplinary storyteller, artist, and teacher known for a unique voice and unconventional style. Through imaginative narratives, King weaves together Movement, Color, and Sound, cultivating innovative understandings and uses of creative devices. King is a weaver of story who uses the elements of Movement, Color, and Sounds to draw out imaginative narratives that bring honor and dignity to his experience of Blackness. His work honors ancestral rememory and seeks to affirm his practice as one of healing modality and portal maker.

Collective Artist Statement

Group Showing

WE ARE stewards of Black Feminist centered art practices, a group of people, people who are artists, artists who are people, at various stages in our respective crafts. WE ARE poets, experimental filmmakers, documentarians, ethnographers, crafters, painters, hairdressers, storytellers, historians, embroiderers, writers, movers, transmuters, and healers. WE create in conversation with our realities, WE create as means of protest, expression, collective and self healing, unlearning, processing, and ritual and and and. WE ARE from various places and spaces, and all find ourselves growing here in Durham, NC on this land of rich cultural and social tradition that was seeded by the enslaved laborers and self-liberating artists and entrepreneurs who built the prestige of this city; WE remain accountable to their shaping of these lands, first stewarded by the Shakori, Lumbee, Cheraw, and Ocaneechee band of the Saponi. WE ARE a group of Black, Queer, Non-Binary, Trans, Femme, Women, human beings who are each experiencing varying degrees of disability. These are our stories.

Photos by: Ivy Nicole-Jonet

Crowd sourced photos by: JAC M. and Medusa

“Art Space Incubator is the best space I've experienced in years. Being surrounded by fellow Black queer artists, surviving late stage capitalism and using art as a tool of living is truly the highlight of my year.”

“My experience in the Incubator was one of discovery, a chance to explore creating art through the lens of the process rather than the end product. It was a time of growth and transformation, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to collaborate with such talented individuals and see the culmination of so many unique ideas. Although I faced some challenges along the way, the group showing highlighted what can be achieved through the creative process, and for that I am grateful.”

“This space allowed me to move slow and freely. It gave me permission to dream of my art journey.”

“The Incubator gave me a space to show up as I was, to create art that was more about the process than the result, and provided me support with coming as I was.”