Jalen Hamilton is a photographer, educator, and poet raised in Englewood on the south side of Chicago. He is the product of front porch candy stores, neosporin, and barbershops. As a former enthusiast of pointed sideburns and Chicago’s vacant lots, Jalen has utilized his surroundings to create images that discuss the cultural significance and intersectionality of African American identities. With heavy influences from artists such as Kendrick Lamar, Richard Wright, Saul Williams, ASAP Mob, and Lang Leav, Jalen believes his primary purpose as an artist is to educate. Using a love for writing as the foundation for all endeavors, Jalen has utilized this passion to help create curriculum for first year college students, to facilitate workshops on Mental Wellness and the college experience, and as a volunteer organizer of the Black Mental Wellness Weekend open mic in Chicago, IL (2017). As a current graduate student of Loyola university’s cultural and educational policy studies program, J. Hamilton plans to utilize his love for art and education to transform Chicago schools. Hamilton’s photography was included in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry’s Black Creativity Juried Art Exhibition (2020). Hamilton was co-facilitator of Blanc’s Deeply Curious Residency (III). To Whom This Ground Belongs is his first solo exhibition.
Chicago Heights native Faith “Faith Over Allat” Overall is an English teacher and spoken word artist who finds sustainability and liberation in artistic expression. Since 2014, Faith has dedicated her time as a poet to amplifying and connecting the ways in which emotion can become the driving force for intense and necessary conversations. Her work requires listeners and onlookers to not only examine themselves, but examine and respond to the ways in which our intersectional identities are more similar than they are different. With those ideals in mind, Faith established the Write It Down! Collective (IG: @thewriteitdowncollective) in order to provide space for participants to show up and just “be.” This, a response to the emergent need for a space dedicated specifically to writing-creatives “and their creative homies.” Overall was one of the participants of Blanc’s Deeply Curious Residency (III).
