Black Lunch Table 2022 User Group Report

Black Lunch Table Wikimedians applied for user group status in December 2018 and were recognized by The WMF in January 2019. The following report documents the user group’s activities between January--December 2022.

This timeframe is identical to the receipt and first year of a WMF Multi Year Community Fund Grant 2022-2024. This period also intersects with the continued national and international COVID-19 pandemic.

PROJECT AND USER GROUP DESCRIPTIONS

Black Lunch Table’s (BLT) primary aim is the production of discursive sites, wherein artists and local community members engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues. BLT mobilizes a democratic rewriting of contemporary cultural history by animating discourse around and among the people living it. BLT was founded in 2005 and became a 501c3 non profit organization in 2019.

The Wikimedia Foundation estimates that 77% of Wiki editors are white and 91% are men. Our work shifts this demographic and empowers people to write their own history. Our sessions and events, including edit-a-thons, BLT Bingo Contests, BLT Live, and monthly office hours, equip new editors with the skills and resources to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles and encourage existing editors to focus on Wikipedia knowledge gaps

SUMMARY

BLT’s 2022 programming was expected to be a return to pre-pandemic in-person programming but largely continued as pandemic oriented, distance and online events.

During 2022, BLT hosted 32 events. Our edit-a-thons remained largely online while our BLT Photo Booth project grew as a desirable and safe distanced event. This year’s events included partnerships with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Illingworth Kerr Gallery, Albright-Knox Gallery, and Pace Gallery. Our regional proxies hosted internationally across Botswana, Nigeria, and DR Congo; as well as nationally in Seattle, WA and Houston, TX.

BLT’s Wikimedia initiative includes a variety of programs that happen on and offline. These have continued to be adapted as needed throughout the pandemic and currently include the following, descriptions and discussion below.

Wikimedia Fellow
BLT:Office Hours (online)
BLT:Live (online)
BLT BINGO (online)
Black Lunch Table Edit-a-thons (in-person)
Black Lunch Table Photobooth (in-person)
Black Lunch Table Proxy engagements (in-person)

Our metrics can be accessed via Outreach Dashboard HERE.

Our full calendar of events including meetup pages can be accessed HERE.

PROGRAM DESCRIPTIONS

Wikimedia Fellow: The Wikimedia Fellow will work on site at Pace Gallery New York and remotely with Black Lunch Table to improve the presence of artist’s biographies and related topics on multiple Wikimedia platforms. The Wikimedia Fellow will have access to Pace’s library and archive holdings during the year fellowship in order to improve existing Wikipedia articles by adding context and references and creating new pages on notable topics and artists.The fellowship will conclude with a related archival exhibition related to the work completed during the term.

BLT: Office Hours: Online Wikipedia editing and assistance. Creates an opportunity for participants to ask questions, edit with other Wikimedians, be in community, etc. Topic Focus sessions feature experts on WikiEDU, editing on mobile devices, Wikidata, and Spanish language editing, etc. Events are open to all skill levels. Monthly online.

BLT: Live: on IG Live A series of Instagram live artist “talks” that highlight the work and interests of individual Black artists. This program was devised as a way to direct money to artists as exhibitions and freelance work were canceled due to COVID. As scheduled.

BLT BINGO: is a bi-monthly contest series that celebrates the work of artists by working to increase information about them on Wikimedia platforms and increasing editor's fluency with all Wiki platforms. “BLT Bingo Tips” is a campaign run on Twitter to support the awareness of the contest and artists. A new card and theme is released every two months with a summer vacation.

Black Lunch Table Edit-a-thons, Proxy engagements, and BLT Photo Booth: The core activity of the BLT Wikimedians user group has always been edit-a-thons. Black Lunch Table's central focus on Wikipedia is training editors, especially people of color and women, so that they may participate in the Movement and also asks the dominant editorship to focus on gaps in coverage on Wikimedia. After introducing editors to the Movement, BLT focuses on the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikimedia documents that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists. We offer editors and community members an opportunity to engage in this work and learn through online and in person editing events.

Recognizing that Wikipedia is not the only platform that lacks information about the lives of Black artists, the BLT Photo Booths increase images of Black artists on WikiCommons. We host photographers and artists local to an event and upload the images taken during the event, thereby increasing the actual visibility of Black artists on WikiCommons.

CHALLENGES, SUCCESSES, AND LEARNING POINTS

Like most of us in year three of the pandemic BLT hoped and expected to be able to begin bringing programs back to the people and holding more in-person events. While some communities felt safer hosting in-person events than others, it was not a true return in 2022. We took the changes in stride and continued with accommodations where needed. Our most exciting development for 2022 was our partnership with Pace Gallery in NYC. What began in 2021 as a collaboration on a Juneteenth Photo Booth has become a more robust partnership hosting our inaugural Wikimedia Fellow.

Our fellow, Kristen J. Owens, is a librarian, curator, and arts educator whose interdisciplinary research, writing, and curatorial work is situated in African American and Black Diasporic studies. She is currently Librarian for African American and Black Diaspora Studies at New York University Libraries.

Owens has focused on a text by Carolyn Fowler Black Arts and Black Aesthetics: A Bibliography (1981) as a central piece of her project. For the fellowship, Owens is crafting her own Black bibliography as it relates to artists exhibited or connected to Pace Gallery in their sixty year history. The fellowship will culminate in an exhibition at Pace Gallery in February 2023 titled [action=query]: Black Arts and Black Aesthetics. Owens’ project on Black bibliography is critical to advancing the work of documenting and disseminating information about artists.

It is a central concern of Black Lunch Table Wikimedians to address the under documented artists and cultural workers on Wikipedia. Owens’ work not only draws attention to the sources of knowledge around these artists but creates a resource that can be utilized by anyone to improve the articles and information about these artists on Wikipedia.

Adaptations that were right for year one and two of the pandemic faltered at times in year three. We found a deficit in online attention and participation in online programming. This led us to a temporary cessation of our BLT Live programming in 2022 although we plan and expect its return in 2023. One online highlight in 2022 was the programming held jointly with user groups WikiNYC and AfroCROWD around The Met’s creation of an Afrofuturist Period Room titled Before Yesterday We Could Fly. More details about the events can be accessed HERE.

The program that escaped the attention deficit and delighted our partners and participants was BLT Photo Booth. We were able to host six during the year including in Calgary, Canada alongside our first 2022 in-person edit-a-thon. The Photo Booth is an initiative that we will continue to host with the goal of formalizing the way that others can contribute to the collection of Black Lunch Table portraits and to Wikimedia Commons. We completed our DIY Photo Booth instructions for folks who may be out of range of our events but who want to contribute.
[link to a image of the instructions uploaded to Wikicommons?]

Our regional proxy engagements continue to be an important part of our work. 2022 welcomed three new Wikimedians whose work in their respective communities was bolstered by BLT. Abel Mbula in DR Congo, Tochi Precious in Nigeria, and Candy Khohliwe in Botswana all hosted events and contests that activated their local Wiki communities [link to their metrics?]. In the United States, Nichole Hart partnered with Wa Na Wari (Seattle, WA), whom we have successfully developed a partnership with over the last three years; and Jaison Oliver hosted an event at the Society for Africans in the Diaspora (Houston, TX).

Finally, in a year of programmatic successes and a few challenges, we must acknowledge that during the 2022 year we had an important organizational transition as well. BLT founder’s Heather Hart and jina valentine stepped away from the project as co-executive directors and will be joining the BLT board as emeritus members in 2023. BLT welcomed our new executive director Eola Lewis Dance in September after an incredible search process.

Eola has worked at the intersection of history, art and culture for twenty-one years having served most recently as the first African American woman named Superintendent of Fort Monroe National Monument and Director of Resource Stewardship and Science at Jamestown and Yorktown; three key sites in telling the history of the making of America. Eola is an interdisciplinary public historian, serving as an interpretive ranger, site manager, program manager and division chief at sites and programs such as the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, the Maggie L. Walker National Historic site, National Capital Parks-East, and the National Underground Railroad Network To Freedom Program.

We are excited to head into 2023 under Eola’s leadership and continue the important work we do on Wikimedia platforms.