Beauty Despite Suffering-Tenesah Hart

the woman i love is very special to me because she gives me food and wakes me up in the morning she is my stepmother. she also is special because she has suffered so much and still looks beautiful. The time that she was most beautiful was the time i saw her when she was getting married to my father in a laced white dress.

She Gives Me What I Need to Succeed-Naeem Wynn

MY MOTHER IS THE WOMEN I LOVE THE MOST.SHE GIVES ME WHAT I NEED TO SUCCED.I HATE TO DISAPOINT HER. SHE BELIEVES IN ME WHEN NOBODY ELSE WILL.THIS MOURNING WHEN I WAS OUT THE HOUSE MY MOTHER HAD HER COAT ON AND WAS READY FOR WORK AND SHE HAD A SPECIAL GLOW ABOUT HER, LIKE WHEN THE MOURNING SUNLIGHT BEAMS THROUGH THE WINDOW. SHE SHOWS SHE LOVES ME ALL THE TIMES BUT, THE ONE TIME I REMEMBER MOST THE IS WHEN SHE TOLD ME NO MATTER WHAT YOU DO, OR SAY I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU WITH ALL MY HEART.

We Work Hand and Hand: James Steward

My grandmother is the woman that I love because, she takes care of me and she nurses me. She also helps me with my homework. My grandmother also helps me with my problems just as a mother should. I take care of her when she is down just to show her my appreciation to all of her hard work and consideration to others. She is only nervous to herself and usually can handle things by herself when she needs her space. When I need help with cleaning my room, she’ll help me with that too. Sometimes, when she is distraught, I help her clean her own room. We work hand and hand together. I would have never met her if I had never been burned. Those were the reasons of my love for my grandmother.

Women We Love Exhibition

Women We Love: Identity, Beauty, and Love through the Eyes of Adolescents
A Multi-Media Portraiture Exhibit

Love’s capacity to create change is demonstrated daily through the words and deeds of people of all races and regions. In some rare and important instances, the force of love has been used to radically transform society—for example, Dr. King changed America forever by persuading citizens that love’s strength can overcome injustice.

Because of the critical importance of love, one of A.B.L.E.’s program components focuses squarely on this vital force: Love Supreme. The name for this component inspired by jazz musician John Coltrane’s seminal album A Love Supreme, in which he argued, through music, that we all experience love as a social, cultural and spiritual force composed of four parts: acknowledgment, pursuance, resolution, and psalm.

Love is not often a word associated with adolescence. We speak of ‘troubled teens,’ ‘at-risk youth,’ and conjure up images of rebelliousness, impudence, or irresponsibility. If we connect adolescents with love at all, it is to equate teenage love with ‘puppy love.’

The sixteen multi-media portraits in this exhibit demonstrate that in fact, adolescents have quite sophisticated ideas about love and can convey those ideas with great clarity. Through photography and digitally-recorded interviews, these young artists have articulated ideas about love and beauty by creating portraits of women close to them that leave little doubt how they feel about their subjects.

A.B.L.E. participants navigated a structured process to develop their ideas about love. Through discussions, journaling exercises, responses to film and musical selections, and other lessons on the theme of love, youth were given multiple opportunities to share their thoughts and experiences, learn from their peers, and confront cultural expectations. At first, participants were cautious about expressing and exploring their ideas about these topics. In the early stages of the Women We Love project, it was not uncommon for students to ask, “What do you mean by love or beauty?” The answer to such queries was simply to remind the questioner: “This project is about who you are becoming, not who the adults have become. It is your answer that is important, not my answer.”

Part of A.B.L.E.’s program philosophy is that traditional, academic literacy can be built through nontraditional, visual literacy. Photography is a key strategy for promoting visual literacy. A photograph is a powerful teaching tool that helps youth connect content and ideas to the context of their own lives. In this instance, the relationship between love, beauty, and identity was the content; and those ideas were brought to life in the process of creating these multimedia portraits. As you view the portraits, listen carefully to the interviews and consider how well the verbal and visual are linked. What I hope you will find is that where there is great love, there are also great and unexpected miracles.

'Whiteness and Being: A Trip Down Connecticut Avenue

Like snow on the first day of spring, the students of went searching for 'whiteness' on Connecticut Avenue. Their task was simple photograph one person, place, and thing that captures your idea of 'whiteness'. Although I was purposefully vague about what I meant by these instructions, it is clear that any exploration of 'whiteness' cannot be easily separated from our ideas race. Here is a sample of what they wrote and witnessed:

The Bike- this is a strange bike with a huge basket attached to it mostly every day I see white people riding their bikes to work, and everywhere else.
The Store- Ms. Tatyana is posing in front of an unusual store with random stuff in it.
The Cross Walk- there are 4 "whities" are crossing the street.

Kennisha Nelson