The Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center kicked off Black History Month Friday night with an art exhibition by an IU MFA student at 5:30 p.m. in the Neal-Marshall Bridgwaters Lounge and the "Black the Runway" fashion show at 7 p.m. in the Grand Hall.
The two events promoted the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center’s 50th anniversary, IU’s 200th anniversary and African Diaspora.
The event started with an art exhibition featuring Larissa Danielle Smith, an artist pursuing her MFA at IU. Her inspiration for her work came from women around her family and community. Her mom is one of her inspirations for her artwork, she said.
“She’s kind of like the backbone of my inspiration,” Smith said.
Smith said she wanted to highlight hair discrimination in her artworks. Some hairstyles that she featured as part of her artworks are afros and dreadlocks. She said black people specifically still don’t appreciate their natural hair.
“I want to show that even though these women had their natural hair,” Smith said. “They are beautiful.”
Some of the pieces were made from pennies, textile fabrics, bottle caps and CDs. She said she would use materials that had direct and indirect symbolism to her.
“Sometimes I’ll put something in the painting that’s kind of hidden that only I know the meaning of it,” Smith said. “Sometimes I put things in a painting that would mean something for everyone.”
Later, guests filled the room while electronic pop and rap music blared from the background for the "Black the Runway" fashion show.
The show featured seven different segments, each featuring different fashion including children’s fashion, men’s and black church. It also highlighted fashion from famous black films and TV shows such as “Friday” and “Love and Basketball.
IU alumna Nailah Karim, one of the designers for the show created clothes which represented beauty and confidence, host Ellise Smith said.
“The highlight of black experience are clothing, accessories and most important, storytelling,” Ellise Smith said.
The fashion show had a 15-minute intermission where attendees had the option to look at a set of mannequins with denim jackets and black shirts prepared by black students near the Grand Hall windows.
After the intermission, the show took a moment of silence for Kobe and Gigi Bryant.
“He was a father, he was a friend and he was someone who represented black excellence in our community,” Smith said.
Senior Abbie Watson said she came to the fashion show to support her friend Ramatou Soumare who modeled and curated for “The Motherland," one of the segments of the fashion show that highlighted different regions of African fashion.
“It’s amazing,” Watson said. “All the styles are so beautiful, so diverse".
Center Director Monica Johnson said at the end of the event that Black History Month is important to not only IU but also the black community throughout Bloomington.
“We create what culture is,” Johnson said. “We define what culture is.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the Grand Hall of the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center. The IDS regrets this error.
