A collage of squares including photos of Black people looking towards the camera, group shots in a bookstore, logos for Culture push, the Sage Center, and the Black Utopian Fellowship, and text boxes that read “intergenerational workshp centered around black lgbtq elders and the youth. Archiving our stories in the Harlme community.“ and “share and collect our stories
A continuation of Yanni Young’s first workshop which focused on bridging the gap between Black LGBTQ elders and the younger generation.
The goal of this workshop is to share, document and archive our stories as Black LGBTQ+ people. Participants are asked to bring photos of loved ones & or themselves (with a description or story of the photo), poems and short stories to be collected for the creation of a zine. The stories & or poems can be on anything you want. Some examples might be about “Love/intimacy, community, identity, ‘coming into’ (rather than ‘coming out’), dating, aging, Black diasporic experience, family/chosen family, partnerships.”
The purpose of the zine is to serve as a physical archive of the work I've been doing during this fellowship. Harlem serves as the backdrop/epicenter of my work. There will be a workshop table with pens, pencils, for people to create and share with folks around them to then be collected, an altar set up for people to give offerings as well as to add photos of loved ones that people have lost. Another component of the symposium is I will be asking food to come up one by one to be video interviewed. You will be asked short questions which will be used as a part of my fellowship interviews. My hope for this symposium is to create an intergenerational space for Black LBGTQ people to get to know and connect with one another in Harlem.
About the Artist:
Yanni Young is a Black, queer, multi-disciplinary artist born and raised in Harlem, NYC. Yanni grew up performing in plays, musicals, played piano for five years and attended a performing arts high school as a vocal major. Other mediums that Yanni has explored have been podcasting as well as documentary filmmaking. For two years Yanni had a podcast called "Soul Rebel Podcast" centering Black artists, healers, and grassroots organizers, allowing them to speak on their work and their life journey that led to where they are in the present. They currently intern for a Black jewelry brand based in Brooklyn by the name of Heavy Metals NYC. Yanni is also an administrative assistant and teaching artist with the LEAP program of NYC in Brooklyn.