With the Black Lives Matter movement taking center focus in Chicago and outside our city walls, the community is teeming with active engagement and empowerment. We see this with protests, public art, music, and even Columbus statues coming down: racial justice activism is uniquely alive after months of pandemic hibernation. A new multigenerational coloring book called #BlackArtMatters seeks to contribute to the cause by highlighting Black artists, representing the breadth of Blackness and the importance of racial and gender equality.
Cavner is one of nine other Black contemporary artists who submitted work for the book: Anthony Conover, Corinne Salter, Idia Aikhionbare, Juliana Lebron, Kristle Marshall, Leeya Rose Jackson, Lo Harris, and Sabrina Dorsainvil each contributed to the project and brought different artistic styles and messages that added to the book’s diversity. The curators say the artists—whose work they were familiar with, though they’d never met—made the project possible. “They were willing to participate with two young people they’d never met—they took a chance with us in allowing us to use their work and to have people purchase their work,” Switall says.
