Johnson Publishing Library Reading with zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal

Scholars, artists, and cultural workers are invited to read selections from our Johnson Publishing Library as a way to activate the collection. Guests will read from a selection of particular significance to their research, followed by a reflection and discussion.

About the Johnson Publishing Library

The Johnson Publishing Library is a collection of books and periodicals donated by the Johnson Publishing Company (JPC), publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines. The collection includes publications from the 1940's to the present day, and also includes the company's in-house library once used by JPC editors and writers.

About zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal

zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal makes work to further understand how the specificity of her own lived experiences are connected to historical and contemporary movements that involve embodied knowledge production. She explores this through social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, drawing, and found images. She seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) which she processes through empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Within her projects there's an overlying theme of trying to make sense of what and who she belongs to across time, location, and space.

Ultimately, she intends for her work to encourage ways of being and feeling beyond the systems we inhabit.

zakkiyyah has been included in numerous group exhibitions and has had several solo exhibitions at Mana Contemporary, Blanc Gallery, Indiana University, and South Bend Museum of Art. Her work has been presented in various forms at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, NADA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, Chicago Humanities Festival, DePaul University, and Harvard Graduate School of Design to name a few. She has also curated exhibitions at spaces such as Chicago Art Department, Blanc gallery and Washington Park Arts Incubator at the University of Chicago. She was recently a 2021 Artist in Residence at Arts and Public Life at University of Chicago, a 2021 Artist in Residence at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, and a 2022 3Arts Gary & Denise Gardner Fund Awardee.

zakkiyyah is also a Co-founder of CBIM (Concerned Black Image Makers): a collective of Black artists, thinkers, and curators that prioritize shared experiences and concerns by lens based artists of the Black diaspora.