The Black Lunch Table seeks to democratize the writing of contemporary art history by animating discourse among the people living this history.
These roundtable sessions provide both physical space and allotted time for interdisciplinary and intergenerational discussions, bringing together a diversity of community members and fostering candid conversations.
In its 16 year existence, The Black Lunch Table has taken a variety of forms including Wikipedia edit-a-thons. Black Lunch Table Wikimedians mobilize the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikipedia articles that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists. In the field of mainstream contemporary art, Black artists are still marginalized within our field.
Wikipedia estimates that 77% of their editors are white and 91% of their editors are men. Our work shifts this demographic and empowers people to write their own history. Our sessions and events, including BLT Photobooth and edit-a-thons, equip new editors with the skills and resources to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles and encourages existing editors to focus on Wikipedia knowledge gaps.
Along with our Roundtables, our Wikipedia Edit-a-thons and Photo Booth events have taken place all across the United States and the world!
This application conceptualizes the audio archives of the Black Lunch Table BLT project as a network. Topics, identified by volunteer compilers and associated with Library of Congress Subject Headings, are linked to different talks, with the size of the node and width of the edge representing the total amount of time the topic was discussed. Clicking on a topic will generate links to the archived audio files at the point where that topic was discussed.
While still in development, the concept image above will help users visualize the current progress of the Archive.
We hope that this new conceptualization of an audio archive will allow you to see how the various talks recorded by the BLT team fit into a broader conversation about arts, race, and social justice issues, while at the same time providing an intuitive and easy to use access point to our recordings.