Art
U.C. Berkeley Student Artist Eniola Fakile’s Work Takes on Chaos as Theme
As a Master of Fine Arts student in the Department of Art Practice, Eniola Fakile says she feels encouraged by the faculty to go further, to push herself into new depths of self-exploration. It’s something she has been compelled to do since she was a kid — to put herself and her ideas out into the world, no matter how painful it might be.
By Anne Brice | Excerpted from the Berkeley News
Eniola Fakile’s creations live in another world.
Fakile is a photographer. A performance artist. A filmmaker. A sculptor. A costume designer. She works in textiles, ready-made objects and assemblage. She’s not constrained by what has been or should be. Instead, she expands outward to see how far she can go. When an idea flashes in her mind, she imagines a new universe in which that idea, that creation, lives.
“I’m addicted to making things complicated,” she says. “I can never make something basic and easy. I like chaos of my own making because I made it.”
She builds sculptures. Some that people wear — and that she wears — and often posed meticulously. The harder the costumes are to build, the better. They might be made of fuzzy, neon-colored fabric. Or long, fluffy wigs. Or cotton balls and beads and crumpled tissue paper. Right now, she’s trying to figure out how to build a dress out of concrete — with an emphasis on the word “try,” she says.
As a Master of Fine Arts student in the Department of Art Practice, she says she feels encouraged by the faculty to go further, to push herself into new depths of self-exploration. It’s something she has been compelled to do since she was a kid — to put herself and her ideas out into the world, no matter how painful it might be.
Berkeley News spoke with Fakile about the process of creating art — “It’s 0.1% bravery and the rest is, like, I need to get it out,” she says — and how she’s learning to accept her wide-open nature, even when she doesn’t want to.
Berkeley News: Where did you grow up and what was your childhood like?
Eniola Fakile: I grew up in Stone Mountain, Georgia. I have two lovely immigrant parents who would do anything for me. My parents are from Nigeria. Even though I was born in America, the vibe in my house was like, “Don’t forget that you’re Nigerian. Don’t forget culture and family.” I’m exactly the same as how I was when I was a kid. I wasn’t the kid who everyone was like, “Oh, they’re going to be an artist.” I just did weird stuff. I liked to play outside, and I liked to talk to trees, play in the dirt. I was a bubbly kid. I cried a lot. I still do.
Have you always been interested in creating art?
I feel like I’ve always been doing art. I had an active imagination as a kid. The first time I really got into it was my freshman year of high school. My parents got me my first digital camera when I was a freshman in high school. It was this basic little point-and-shoot thing. I always had my camera with me. I was always taking photos. I took photos of my friends. I took endless photos of trees. I took photos of my feet. I took photos of my hands. I took photos of food. I just really wanted to reintroduce myself to the world through a camera lens.
As a sophomore, I took a film photography class. I fell in love with how physical of a practice it is. It’s learning how to handle things with care, working with chemicals, going out and making mistakes, going out again, making it better.
(Using herself as the ‘model,’ Fakile worked on a video series. Part of one is her exploration of what it means to be a Black woman.)
Eniola Fakile: With each video, I wanted to dig deeper, but then, I also wanted the filming to get better. So, I was trying to progress as a videomaker. I made it over a year, and during that time, I started to become more and more comfortable with myself in front of the camera, talking about these things. And I’m always trying to be really careful about how I talk about being Black in my work because the way I feel about it is complicated.
Don’t get me wrong — I love being Black. But I feel like I want to make work about being Black without being exclusionary. So, I try to make work with little markers that I know other Black people can identify with, but then also everyday things that I know other people will respond to, so that it’s work that anyone can feel connected to. But especially Black people.
So, the series is about all those things. It’s about me as a Black woman dealing with my body image issues or how to deal with my hair. But it is also about me as a person dealing with the stress of everyday life, imposter syndrome, not feeling like I’m good enough. All of those things.
Berkeley News: How do you approach creating art? Once you get an idea, where do you begin?
Eniola Fakile: Every time I start a new series of work, I buy a journal, and I write down what I want to talk about. The process involves a lot of crying. It involves watching the same things over and over again to get the design juices flowing. Like, I’ll watch New Girl over and over again. I’ll watch Cruella — love that movie. The Devil Wears Prada. There’s a show called A Discovery of Witches with a season set in Elizabethan England.
When I get an idea for a sculpture or costume or whatever you want to call them — I still don’t have a name for them — it’s like a quick flash in my mind. I’ll do a really quick, messy sketch. Then, I try my best to build it. And it changes along the way.
My ideas manifest out of everyday things, like a hamburger. I’ll think: What is a hamburger? What if that hamburger had feelings? How do I turn that into a shoe? It sounds ridiculous. It involves a lot of fantasy and imagination, and I love doing it.
See more of Fakile’s work on her website and Instagram page.
Art
BLACspace Cooperative Invites Bay Area to Experience Oakland’s Black Cultural Ecosystem Through a BLAC Map Tour + Party
BLACspace Cooperative invites the Bay Area to experience Oakland’s Black cultural ecosystem through its BLAC Map Tour + Party on October 2. Presented as part of the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the event offers a guided field trip through creative and cultural spaces, followed by a celebration. Guests will explore the people and places shaping Black arts and culture across Oakland. The tour highlights BLACspace’s interactive guide to spaces stewarded by its members. Read more to learn about this unique event.
Presented as part of MoAD’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the October 2 experience takes guests inside the spaces, practices, and relationships that keep Black arts and culture rooted in Oakland
What does Oakland’s Black cultural ecosystem look like from the inside?
On Friday, October 2, BLACspace Cooperative will bring its BLAC Map to life with The BLAC Map Tour + Party, a two-part experience connecting artists, cultural workers, community partners, funders, and arts lovers with the people and places shaping Black arts and culture across Oakland and the greater Bay Area.
Presented as part of the Museum of the African Diaspora’s Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, the day begins at MoAD at 685 Mission St. at 12 noon with a guided field trip through creative and cultural spaces connected to the BLACspace ecosystem.
Guests will travel together by bus from San Francisco to Oakland, stepping inside studios, cultural hubs, creative businesses, and gathering places while experiencing artist talks, exhibitions, film, music, movement, ancestral practice, and opportunities for conversation.
The Tour is an extension of The BLAC Map of Oakland, BLACspace’s interactive guide to creative and cultural spaces stewarded by members of its ecosystem. The map makes visible a network of people and places working to keep Black culture rooted in a city where displacement, rising costs, and shrinking arts funding continue to threaten cultural permanence.
“We call this work Cultural Reforestation,” said Zakiya Harris, Vision and Leadership steward of BLACspace Cooperative. “It’s about repairing, replenishing, and rooting Black arts and culture where it has been displaced, and creating the conditions for our cultural ecosystem to remain for generations to come.”
The Tour will move through several Bay Area cultural spaces, including Minnesota Street Project, The Barn, B-Love’s Guest House, Koo Labs Production & Design Center, BAM House, and BlaQyard, with experiences featuring members and collaborators across the BLACspace ecosystem.
At 5 p.m., the field trip gives way to The BLAC Map Party, a celebration of the ecosystem the Tour spent the day exploring. The evening invites the wider community to gather for music, food, art, cultural activations, an opening Ring Shout ceremony, and connection among Black artists, cultural workers, organizations, and the people who support their work.
The experience reflects BLACspace’s larger belief that the future of Black arts and culture requires cooperation.
As a Black arts and culture-promoting cooperative, BLACspace brings together artists, cultural workers, creative businesses, and organizations to share resources, relationships, knowledge, and stewardship.
Through membership, holistic business coaching, mutual aid, consulting, storytelling, and advocacy for cultural spaces, the cooperative is building infrastructure intended to strengthen Oakland’s Black cultural economy for the long term.
EVENT INFORMATION
The BLAC Map Tour + Party
Friday, Oct. 2
BLAC Map Tour: 12–5 p.m.
Begins at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD)
685 Mission St., San Francisco
BLAC Map Party: 5–8 p.m.
Oakland, California
Party location provided to confirmed RSVP guests.
Tickets, RSVP information, and additional event details are available through BLACspace Cooperative at ABOUT BLACSPACE COOPERATIVE
About BLACspace Cooperative:
BLACspace Cooperative connects and cultivates an ecosystem of artists, cultural workers, creative businesses, and organizations shaping Black arts and culture. Through holistic business coaching, values-aligned consulting, shared stewardship, and advocacy for cultural spaces, BLACspace works to create the conditions for its ecosystem to remain rooted and thrive.
Its work is grounded in Cultural Reforestation: strengthening what is here, restoring what has been displaced, and building toward cultural permanence in Oakland and beyond for the next 100 years.
Adéniké Amin is the storytelling steward for BLACspace Cooperative. For media and other information, please reach out to adenike@blacspace.coop
Art
Misty Copeland Shapes Ballet’s Tomorrow
THE POSITIVE COMMUNITY — Misty Copeland will curate the 2026 Joyce Ballet Festival, a two-week event in New York City from August 4-16. This role allows her to influence the future of ballet by showcasing a wide range of dancers, choreographers, and companies. The festival will present both established and contemporary works, blending classical traditions with new artistic expressions.
This summer, Misty Copeland will step into a different kind of spotlight. Instead of taking center stage as a dancer, she will help determine what audiences see onstage as curator of the 2026 Joyce Ballet Festival. Taking place August 4 through August 16 at The Joyce Theater in New York City, the two-week celebration will bring together dancers, choreographers and companies representing a broad spectrum of ballet. The festival gives Copeland an opportunity to share not only her appreciation for ballet’s traditions, but also her vision for its future.
Copeland understands better than most how powerful a ballet stage can be. Her historic career with American Ballet Theatre changed the conversation about representation in one of the world’s most traditional performing arts. When she became the company’s first Black woman to reach the rank of principal dancer, her achievement carried significance far beyond a personal milestone. It gave young dancers of color a new image of what was possible and challenged the industry to reconsider who belonged at the center of ballet.
That history informs the perspective she brings to the festival. Copeland has spent much of her career moving between performance, mentorship, advocacy and storytelling. Her curatorial role allows her to bring those interests together by creating a program that does not treat ballet as a museum piece. Instead, the festival presents dance as an evolving language capable of carrying classical traditions into new cultural and artistic territory.
Audiences will encounter a mixture of established works and contemporary creations during the festival. Classical ballet vocabulary will share space with choreography that pushes dancers toward different physical, emotional and theatrical possibilities. The result is intended to give audiences a broader understanding of the art form while demonstrating that tradition and innovation do not have to be competing forces.
The lineup also provides an opportunity to see dancers from different artistic environments. Performers connected to organizations including American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, Paris Opera Ballet, Houston Ballet, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Complexions Contemporary Ballet are among those represented in the festival. Each company carries its own history and artistic identity, making their participation part of a larger conversation about the many ways ballet can be performed and interpreted.
The presence of Dance Theatre of Harlem is particularly meaningful within the larger story of Copeland’s career and the evolution of Black representation in ballet. Founded during a period when opportunities for Black dancers were severely limited, the company helped demonstrate that excellence and classical training could flourish in a Black cultural environment. Its legacy continues to influence dancers and audiences, making its connection to a festival curated by Copeland especially resonant.
The program also reaches beyond a single definition of contemporary ballet. Choreographers with different backgrounds and artistic philosophies contribute to an evening that can move from recognizable classical structures to works shaped by modern dance, theater, popular culture and new approaches to movement. That diversity reflects a generation of artists who increasingly see ballet not as a rigid vocabulary but as a foundation from which they can explore.
For New York audiences, the festival offers something that is increasingly valuable: the opportunity to experience outstanding dancers in an intimate setting. The Joyce is known for presenting dance in a theater where audiences can see movement and artistry up close. That environment can make a familiar ballet work feel newly personal while allowing experimental pieces to communicate with unusual immediacy.
Copeland’s role as curator also sends a message about the importance of artistic leadership. The people who select performers and choreography help determine which stories receive attention and which artists receive opportunities. By bringing a range of voices into the festival, Copeland is using that responsibility to broaden the conversation around ballet. Her choices can introduce audiences to artists they may not otherwise encounter while encouraging longtime ballet followers to look at the form from a different perspective.
The 2026 Joyce Ballet Festival ultimately arrives at an important moment for the art form. Ballet is carrying centuries of tradition into an era defined by changing audiences, broader representation and increasingly adventurous choreography. Copeland’s festival reflects that transition. For two weeks in August, The Joyce will become a meeting place for the familiar and the unexpected—a celebration of where ballet came from and a preview of where it may be going. And with Misty Copeland helping shape the conversation, the future of ballet promises to be as expansive as the dancers who are defining it.
Based on reporting by The Positive Community.
Art
BOOK REVIEW: Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl: Essays
Growing up in North Carolina, she Black Girled her hair her entire life. Her grandma made her sit for box braids when she was small, telling Brown that she was “tenderheaded.” Later, Brown had relaxed hair until she “went broke” and couldn’t afford the process anymore. That was when she got acquainted with her natural hair – although she returned to box braids at least once, and loved them all over again.
Author: Amena Brown, Copyright: c.2026, Publisher: Tiny Rep Books, SRP: $30.00, Page Count: 320 pages
Some things can really make you cross.
People telling you your business, for instance. People asking questions they have no reason to know the answers to. Folks who criticize your hair or clothes or life. These things would set anyone off; they’d be the last straw for anybody. As in the new book, “Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl” by Amena Brown, some folks just cross the line.
In a way, it’s a matter of grammar.
Depending on how you say it, “Black Girl is a noun and a verb,” says Brown. A Black Girl can be a Black Girl… and she can Black Girl. Brown herself has done it “in six countries.”
Growing up in North Carolina, she Black Girled her hair her entire life. Her grandma made her sit for box braids when she was small, telling Brown that she was “tenderheaded.” Later, Brown had relaxed hair until she “went broke” and couldn’t afford the process anymore. That was when she got acquainted with her natural hair – although she returned to box braids at least once, and loved them all over again.
As the child of a strict Pentecostal mother, Brown was a “late bloomer.” She didn’t drink alcohol until she was in her twenties. She was chaste while dating and a better church girl than a party girl. After she left the church, she began experimenting with wine first, then cocktails. She learned to cook, reasoning that the path to finding love started in a kitchen, one that happened to be her grandmother’s. And yes, love did eventually come in the form of a red-headed White man who was her friend before he became her boyfriend — and before he became her mother-sanctioned, grandma-approved husband.
Overall, says Brown, there is no single right method for doing this.
“There are so many ways to Black Girl, which means the way you Black Girl is beautiful, and the way I Black Girl is beautiful too.”
Looking for a collection of addictive, can’t-read-just-one essays that’ll make you laugh but that also feel like author Amena Brown is peeking at your life? Want a book that speaks to every corner of your existence?
Yeah, then you want “Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl.”
You know how it is when you spot something so profound, so right, that you just have to call your friends and read it out loud to them? That’s what you’ll find here: truth told with humor that’s also oozing with warmth. Add honesty that’s smart and bold and practically begging for a “Heck, YES!” and you’ve got your new favorite book.
The essays here are short enough to read in a few minutes, but compelling enough to make you want more, so give yourself room.
This is a book for twenty- and thirty-somethings, but also for their mothers and grandmas who can handle respectful irreverence and surefooted playfulness. Can men enjoy “Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl”? Sure, but it’s more for women, cross your heart.
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