Family!
You may have noticed that the shop has been on an extended hiatus this time.
While it wasn’t planned I will definitely say that it was necessary to take that time and reflect on what I was doing and what my goals were in doing any of this.
When I first started Lucy St. I did so with two intentions. The first was to build a more sustainable practice for myself as an artist and the second was to fill what I saw was a need for more representation in consumer goods.
“Why wait for someone else to sell my work?’ and “Why wait for someone else to champion Black art?” were the questions that served as the motivating force behind what I was doing.
While this is still the case, the idea has evolved in such a way that it made me realized I was reluctant to answer the “What is Lucy St. question in any definitive way because I was still learning about it as I went along. Sometimes ideas take on a life of their own and refuse simple definitions. I’d say this is one of those times.
So what have I learned?
Well, I know now that Lucy St. isn’t just a business.
It is an artwork. A performance piece that relies on the collaboration and participation of my community in order to thrive.
Lucy St. is a method of curating. A thematic concept that can unite seemingly unrelated artforms into a multi-vocal presentation of “culture”.
Lucy St. is memory and archive. Preserving culture and allowing it to be experienced long after the neighborhoods that housed it are gentrified out of existence.
And, yes. It is a business as well. One that I am in no rush to make “bigger” and will grow naturally at my own pace.
I named this business after the street that ran through the community that I grew up in. It was a place where the community congregated to celebrate and to live their day to day lives. Everything happened on Lucy St…..
BUT there were some things that never got a chance to happen on Lucy St….Things the community needed and lacked.
In a way, Lucy St. is a celebration of “the mundane” and all of the things that make up Black existence, that you had to have experienced to know about.
In a different way, it is also a way for me to re-imagine what my community may have been like if it was allowed to thrive.
I have more to say on the subject but this will do for now.
Even as I type, I can feel new ideas forming. We will see where that takes us next.
I love you, family.
-Friday