Brown Girls Unite

2017 Anne Summer is here and school is out! As an art teacher I am thoroughly enjoying the break and catching up on a few Netflix series. It was to my surprise that I found one of my childhood favorite books remade as a Netflix series, "Anne with an E". The original book series is Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery and it centers around a young orphan girl mistakenly sent to an older bachelor brother and sister living on Prince Edward Island, Canada. I loved this series while growing up and I remember watching the 1985 TV series directed by Kevin Sullivan and aired on the CBC Network. I loved the exaggerated language and energy of the character. While the newer Netflix Anne has the expanded vocabulary and feist the flashbacks she has are darker in content.  1985 Anne Even so I have enjoyed the realism of this new Anne, therefore I've decide to make her my own by adding some melanin to this literary legend. I've painted a new version of Anne as a gi...

So the Brown Girls Unite library has been a success! Here at Brown Girls Unite I not only empower through Fine Art but also through Diverse Books, so over the summer we launched a micro library filled with diverse books. The feedback from the community was great! Neighbors gave unsolicited donations of books by the bag full. Children raced to the library to find a book, then came back with friends. These young readers could not believe that they could actually take the books home. I specifically remember two young girls around the age of  six who told me "Thank you so much for the books!" which really touched me. Children are appreciative of the books and open to reading in a neighborhood that 40% of the population is below poverty level. The median income of the neighborhood is only $24,087 a year and 73.8% of the population  is Black/African American. There is a major misconception that urban, African American children don't read, don't want to read, and the commu...