By Vivian Phillips
Historically, Black women have been incredible keepers of our culture. They hold up our history with their wisdom shared through poetry, storytelling, visual and performing arts, arts leadership, and community support. In her novel Family, J. California Cooper writes in the opening words, “History. Lived, not written, is such a thing not to understand always, but to marvel over.”
Cooper’s stories brought to life Black female characters who confront a world filled with indifference, betrayal, and social invisibility, yet through it all, they find kinship and survival. A prolific author and playwright, Cooper wrote 17 plays, 13 books, and short story collections. Her career included work as a secretary, truck driver, and a stint working on the Alaska pipeline. Hers was a life of being unbothered by social norms and dedicated to imparting exemplary stories on love, intuitive wisdom, relationships, and community.
The legacy of Cooper, who lived in Seattle for a short time before she died on September 20, 2014, at the age of 82, lives on through the many women she moved, some personally, and others through her writing. Sharon Nyree Williams, Valerie Curtis-Newton, and Dr. Gilda Sheppard are three examples of women touched by “Ms. J” Cooper, as I affectionately called her, and continues to carry her torch.
As an educator, arts manager, Emmy Award winner, and practicing artist, Williams has woven her wisdom into every aspect of her professional career. With each project she undertakes, she creates opportunities for others to step into their own arts and cultural careers, building stairways to success. She understands that her work is not just for herself, but for her entire community. Whether in her adopted home of Seattle or on a national stage, Williams has dedicated herself to supporting fellow artists and arts leaders. For the past decade, she has led the charge at the CD Forum, but now she is ready to pass the torch to new leadership and focus more deeply on her artistic practice.
Valerie Curtis-Newton is a consummate and celebrated educator, writer, and director. She brings stories to life through her experienced and adept directing. Recently, Curtis-Newton directed Reginald André Jackson’s, The History of Theatre: About, By, For and Near, educating audiences on the legacy of Black thespians and Black theater over 200 years. Curtis-Newton’s involvement was essential to Jackson’s vision and execution. She is a trusted collaborator and skilled professional, whose love for live theater and the vast canon of work by Black playwrights that remain under-produced, led her to co-found The Hansberry Project, an African-American theater lab. Curtis-Newton’s work is about legacy building and remembering.
Dr. Gilda Sheppard is a true gem — an educator and filmmaker whose impact on students is nothing short of magnificent. Those who have taken her sociology, cultural, and media classes at The Evergreen State College praise her for her charisma and her downright unfiltered truth-telling. As a published author, Dr. Sheppard is one of the founding members and faculty of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, a program that offers college credit courses at the Washington Corrections Center for Women. Her love for using art as a means of keeping culturally relevant educational stories alive can be viscerally felt in her film, Since I Been Down, which highlights, in the words of Angela Davis, “the liberatory potential of education.”
Women who take up the mantle of arts and community building are often overlooked, underrated, and regularly second-guessed. But for the love of collaboration, shared creativity, limitless possibility, and the important act of sharing our legacy, Black women are holding up the sky and planting trees under which they will not find shade.
There are endless names of Black women providing wise counsel and leadership through the arts and cultural pursuits. They all remind me of Ms. J. California Cooper’s wisdom. Women who see the end and the means while embracing generations of women and leading them to create their perfect place in the world. They are living Black history. They are women of intent. They are women who live by their commitment and ignore the deficit framing by which others might try to define them.
In their work, these women lovingly part the strands of our lives and knit together our shared history of survival and thriving. Their words, their actions, their art, their cultural expressions, and the strength they muster to come to the aid of their community, are what hold us all together. They braid us together — one part history, one part present moment, and one part future with endless future possibilities.
Vivian Phillips is a civic arts and culture leader. She is the founder and board president of the nonprofit Arte Noir black arts.
