Creative Conversations: Hakeem Adewumi with Brenda Cherry

As individuals around the globe contend with persistent and ongoing injustices, artists and activists are working in the studio and in the streets to promote resistance against oppression and disenfranchised populations.

FotoFest presents artist and photographer Hakeem Adewumi in conversation with Brenda Cherry, a Paris, Texas-based civil rights activist and writer. This conversation brings together two voices working in disparate social and cultural realms, arts and activism, to examine the various ways in which sociopolitical resistance can be enacted and performed both locally and globally.

Hakeem Adewumi, a photographer whose work can be described as a celebration of Black presence, joy, and love, photographed Cherry and other activists in the small Texas town of Paris for a recent Texas Monthly magazine story on the town, its burgeoning activist community, and its reckoning with its past as the site of one of the United States’ most infamous lynchings.

Brenda Cherry’s activism spans over two decades, focusing on social issues related to systemic racial inequality such as police murder and misconduct against BIPOC communities, workplace discrimination, and confederate monument intimidation. As the President and Co-founder of Concerned Citizens for Racial Equality, Cherry has organized landmark protests that have influenced public policy and reform in Texas as well as in the context of the U.S. Federal Government.