The Simmering Spices Art Collective is a group of five Girl and Femme of Color (GFOC) curators who worked over the course of a year to create a public gallery exhibition featuring the arts of other GFOC exploring concepts of educational justice. The exhibition, titled “Our Education: Learning & Unlearning” featured the artwork of 10 GFOC who used art to answer the question “What does educational justice look and feel like?” The following is their collective statement describing who they are, what they believe, what they do, and why their work is important. 

Who We Are

We are the Simmering Spices, a collective run by girls and nonbinary femmes of color (GFOC). We all come from different backgrounds, backstories, cultures, and identities, cultivating a rich range of perspectives in our collective. We are inspired by the open mindedness, thoughtfulness, intelligence, observance, and curiosity of girls, who each have their own roles in community and narratives. We are vibrant and bold, just like spices, coming together to foster a complex and one-of-a-kind community. We are the authors and publishers to our own narratives, and we are also the teachers, leaders, listeners, and learners of the future. We simmer with a passion to stand up and demand the attention and respect we deserve. We all value the power that art holds to showcase the unique stories of girlhood and educational justice to our communities and families, and across generations  

What We Believe

Simmering Spices believes in reimagining what both The School and The Gallery can look like. We wish to push back against the idea that our personal experiences do not matter. In doing so, we ask, “What happens when communities of color’s stories, and specifically GFOC’s stories are given instead of stolen?” “What happens when in thinking about schools, we don’t think about the experiences of all Young People, but the experiences of each young person?” We see curation as a conversation grounded in storytelling, where a story’s importance can be found just as much in its emotional sides as it can be its logical sides. Most of all, we believe that GFOC are knowledge-makers just as much as any other group.

What We Do

We curate spaces that are designed to house beautiful works of art crafted by diverse groups of GFOC. We are a gallery that engineers new and innovative concepts that invite inclusivity, unity, and creative thinking. As curators, we each bring our individual experiences to our collective work and understand the importance and implications of storytelling. Sometimes storytelling is loud and vibrant. In some instances, it can be painful and silent. Maybe silence is the story itself. 

Doing our work can look like many different things: having discussions about certain topics; eating and sharing memories together; learning more from our own environments, experts, and local galleries; writing powerfully; collecting art for our gallery; and even catching up with one another on any drama we have. Our work builds the flavor and richness of every spice within us to make the end result a simmering pot of wonderful, intricate, and complex experiences. In all of its complexity, we embrace the silence, the loudness, the untold, and the underrepresented in our art spaces. 

Why This Work Matters

We want to create a powerful space for our fellow GFOC to have their voices heard since our work isn’t always brought up to the eyes of many people. We have the power to speak up on issues we have been facing for many generations and new issues that really impact us as GFOC in the education system. We demand our presence to be known, just like the powerful aromas of delicious simmering spices in a pot attract attention. Through our work we hope to form strong connections that allow us to bond and share not only our pains, but our strengths as well–strengths that come with our background and history. Through this project, people who might not understand us but are willing to try to learn to connect might start to understand us. 

Embracing the simmering warmth and complexity that comes with the rich broth of each spice we use in our work. Empathy and a passion to learn allows us to connect with others and spread our impact. We truly work towards connecting with our fellow spices and allowing our stories and experiences to simmer and stand in unison, making a one-of-a-kind experience that can connect us all.

The four pieces I am sharing for the Mai Pedagogy Project are artistic representations of my analysis of some of the work the Simmering Spices did together. These images are multimedia explorations of the themes, understandings, and knowing that arose from the data collected from the project. Actual pieces of data–including artworks, photographs from the project, writing, and words from transcripts–as well as illustrations of more abstract themes that arose throughout the data–are arranged thematically on canvas. In addition, the materials used are those used during the workshops the girls ran during the gallery exhibition–paint, beads, collaging, and markers. 

One of the Simmering Spices, Sanjana, declared that our work of gallery making was a process of creating “a dream-like world.” Building on this conceptualization of GFOC artspace, each canvas is arranged to represent a “dream-like world” that reflects a theme that arose from the data. These images serve both to convey ideas to a larger audience and will be used as launching off points for more traditional academic writing about the project.