Andrea Walls

Andrea "Philly" Walls is a conceptual artist using a multidisciplinary approach to interrogating, aggravating, and subverting systems of white supremacy. Her practice is informed and inspired by the writers and visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. She is the creator, curator, designer and keeper of several free-access, interactive, web-experiences uplifting the work of women artists, including herself. Although her writing and visual art have been published and awarded, what she wants you to know is that she feels most alive in the process of claiming her ancestral inheritance as a Black woman making work and noise to answer acts of global violence with equal acts of art.

Andrea will continue to expand upon her work and develop a solar powered, mobile Museum of Black Joy. The portable exhibition tower will be available to provide on-site exhibitions at public events, like Juneteenth, Odunde, and neighborhood gatherings, as well as in schools, at bus stops, and in any imaginable community or institutional settings. Andrea’s intention is to provide a portable, multimedia, aesthetic experience (with Black Joy at its center) that also serves a practical, functional purpose that will include a hotspot, mobile charging station, and open source, roundware technology to archive stories of Black Joy. Equipped with a recording device that would allow participants to share geo-located stories of joy, Andrea aims to uphold and protect joy as a revolutionary process and practice.

Andrea will create the Museum of Black Joy, an ongoing visual journal of non-traumatic black life in Philadelphia and beyond. Begun on Jan 1, 2020 and continuing indefinitely, the project will move through several phases over the course of 2 years and be presented in ongoing exhibitions in traditional and non-traditional settings and, ultimately, presented in book form. 

Andrea Walls, as a member and exhibition coordinator with The Women's Mobile Museum (WMM), will be traveling to Johannesburg, South Africa to install and participate in collaborative programming with The Market Photo Workshop and The University of Johannesburg. Through her contacts with WMM originator, Zanele Muholi and other partners, she will have the opportunity to meet with African arts professionals, including curators, gallerists, and administrators throughout South and West Africa. This grant will allow her to document the exhibition and further opportunities to expand her ongoing art and social change project in which she is creating a year-long photo and visual art journal to document 365 days of non-traumatic black life in Philadelphia and beyond.

Andrea’s poetry manuscript, The Black Body Curve, will be transformed into a free-access, interactive website with visual content and teaching curriculum. Revolving around the officially-sanctioned May 13, 1985 MOVE Bombing, Andrea’s project will promote awareness of the continuing historical contexts for the bombing and the ways they are connected to global acts of violence, including poverty. Andrea’s intent is to not only engage youth using accessible technology, but to also provoke thoughtful and nuanced discourse on healing community trauma and resisting cycles of racial injustice and violence.