Jacqueline’s activism focuses on gun violence prevention, anti-police brutality, and pro-black movements. She is perhaps best known for organizing an anti-police brutality protest with over 25,000 attendees, resulting in hundreds of new voter registrations. She serves on the Youth Congress of March for Our Lives in the Artivism committee. Hewlett Packard recently named her as an HP Youth Changemaker and featured her efforts in its Generation Z campaign. Jacqueline is also the co-founder of J & H New Beginnings, a grassroots organization that manufactures and distributes care packages to struggling families, the homeless, and low-income college students. 

HP Changemaker, Oakland Voices, GA Voters, New Beginnings

Before COVID, Demetrius had been working on a photo travel project covering (to date) South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Japan, Hong Kong, Fiji, Cuba, and Amsterdam. He plans to resume the project in 2021. Demetrius has been featured/interviewed in Voyage ATL (VoyageATL) and has been featured in several photo exhibitions. He is a staunch believer in equal rights and voter rights, and doesn’t hold his tongue when it comes to fighting for those causes.

Check out his recent feature in Shout Out Atlanta.

Exhibitions
● The Dean Collection – Bacardi Rum Room, Group Exhibition, American Cut, Atlanta, GA, Curated
by The Dean Collection 2018
● The Art of Bloom, Group Exhibition, GSU Dahlberg Hall, Atlanta, GA, Curated by Ife Okwumabua
2015
● Naturally You, Solo Exhibition, FUSE Arts Center, Atlanta, GA, Curated by Demetrius Williams
2014
Website: Usual Suspects Photography LLC

Having started as a voter registration organizer at age fifteen, her involvement with Martin Luther King, Jr.’s @Southern Christian Leadership Conference took her to civil rights movements in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Washington, D. C., Illinois, and New York.  She participated in the 1963 March on Washington and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March, directed by her father Hosea Williams. 

Dr. Emerson worked with the Congress on Racial Equality in Harlem, NY, organized the anniversary march of the 1987 Forsythe County March against Fear and Intimidation, managed her father’s bid for Congress, and has participated in “Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless” since her family started the dinners nearly 50 years ago. 

Dr. Emerson lectures nationally and internationally on the Civil Rights Movement and her father’s contributions, including King Day celebrations in Corvallis, Ore., Newburgh, NY,  Phoenix, AZ and the Department  of and at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, and the University of Peking in China.  She appeared in “Living Selma,” and “1964” produced by Ambassador Andrew Young, and “Hosea Williams: The Untold Story” Recently, she shared the stage with the daughters of Bishop Desmond Tutu and Malcolm X, reflecting on how growing up with men who changed the world informed their own activism and careers as change makers. 

Dr. Emerson holds a B.A. from New York University and master and doctorate degrees from Columbia University.  Her career included faculty, administrative, and Vice President positions at City University of New York, the New School for Social Research, Audrey Cohen College, and the International College of the Cayman Islands.  She is the first Vice President of “Be the Change PEOPLE” which provides educational support for students in Uganda, East Africa, and is on the Board of SCOPE50 which Dr. King commissioned in 1965 to carry out voter education and political  educational. President of Emerson Consultants with offices in New York and Atlanta, Dr. Emerson is a citizen of the world having visited 52 countries and counting.

He received a BFA from East Carolina University in Illustration. After working for 13 years in the advertising industry with a long list of clients from Nike, Warner Bros to HBO, he decided to move to a purely expressive practice outside of the commercial space where he had the freedom to express more political and socially relevant contemporary themes.

In 2009, He created the World Wide Art Federation, a performance art battle series. The WWAF mixes the swag of Ric Flair with the skill of Bob Ross. Artist must dress up in character and talk trash then paint against each other in a competitive art competition. The winner like in wrestling receives a belt.

His current exhibition series, Contraption will feature, paintings, film and sculpture at Notch 8 Gallery in April 2016.

Recently, as an extension of The Contraption, he created The Merica Show, a kid show for adults, complete with puppets and animation, which the pilot will premiere in November 2015.

No relation to Hosea Williams or Barbara Williams…the universe is just cool like that.

Learn more about Fabian: occationalsuperstar.com

Jacqueline is a resident of Highland Park Illinois. Her most recent effort was the Art Memorial honoring the victims of the July 4th shooting. See HPpromise.org.

She is perhaps best known as the driving force behind the revitalization of Nettelhorst Elementary, an underutilized and under-enrolled public school in Chicago. The effort is outlined in her book, How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood School Renaissance.

Her latest side hustle is Scratch Out Hate, cat scratchers for social impact. Learn more: JVE Website.

Manuel Immigrated to Parkland from Venezuela, has dedicated himself to a particular brand of not-so-subtle activism. He started a non-profit advocacy group called “Change the Ref,” which seeks to vote out politicians who take NRA money and vote in politicians with gun-safety agendas. Manuel uses his artist training and guerilla advertising instincts to focus on “Guac” and the more than 40K victims/year from gun violence in the US. He has painted more than 45 murals around the country and received invitations from international events to share his activism and creative solutions regarding gun violence, has received more than five creative international awards for his disruptive campaigns, supported the American Medical Community with “Impossible Operation Campaign,”. Developed sympathy to the youth by showing a rebellious response to the gun lobby and putting together music projects along with recognized musicians. Promoted and support four documentaries that show the reality behind gun violence. He created the “Museum of Incomplete” as a way to give exposure to other victims that otherwise would have been ignored by society.

To create more awareness, he developed a theater play “Guac My Son, my Hero” along with recognized talents from Broadway and the support from Live Nation. He challenged Corporate America by bringing for the first time a “Gun Safety Certification Program” that represents a new way of consuming goods and services in our country.

He developed the “Guac Talks” as a new stage platform for Gun Violence prevention leaders to share their ideas with no filters or cultural barriers.

“My love for the word and knowledge is infinite” –Joaquin Oliver-

“Gun violence is beyond schools, beyond Parkland and even beyond our amazing son Joaquin.” –Manuel Oliver-

Over the last two years Cleigaie has managed and executed over fifteen fine art exhibitions, community outreach workshops and artist open calls enlisting local, national and international artists to share their works with new patrons and collectors in metro Atlanta. In 2019 she debuted as head curator of Dead Ringer Vol. III, Future Dead Artists’ annual juried group exhibition, featuring a unique concept of the creative inspiration processes between visual artists and photographers.

Possessing a deep interest representation and cultural awareness within communities Cleigaie is dedicated to the equity of funding and access to opportunities that develop for a more inclusive arts ecology where every creative, no matter their affiliation can thrive and inspire.

She has been published in both Visionary Artistry Magazine and Voyage ATL. And as a passionate volunteer has worked with MOCA GA, Sinclair Gallery and various other arts organizations and independent artists around Atlanta. Reach Clei @noigclei

As a participant in dialogue groups in Berlin that include former Nazis, Holocaust survivors, and their descendants, Tamara has experienced first-hand both the extraordinary challenge and reward of engaging with those who at another time would have been her fiercest enemies.  

A child of a Kindertransport survivor, she has been active in educating the public about this rescue mission. As media liaison for the Kindertransport Association, she has placed stories about the Kindertransports in major national/international print media, radio, tv, and cable.   

Tamara continues to give talks, sits on panels, and offers workshops about her experiences with Nazi/Survivor dialogue groups, the Kindertransports, the German Jewish narrative, and her struggles to save her family’s Art Nouveau department store (now a historic monument) that was stolen by the Nazis.

Tamara also meets and collaborates with former Alt-Right, White Supremacists, and KKK members for reconciliation and education. She is currently working on a book of narratives about her legacy and reconciliation work.  She also hosts a monthly second-generation ‘Dinner and Dialogue’, carrying on the work of her grandmother, a salonnière in Berlin, Germany.

Tamara, through her company WorkWell, LLC has taught conflict resolution and cultural diversity courses for large corporations, smaller businesses, NGOs, and the public.  In 1984, she published Help Your Baby Build a Healthy Body (Crown Publishers/Japan Uni Agency).

Tamara is on the advisory board and speakers’ bureau for Parents For Peace an organization dedicated to empowering families, friends, and communities to prevent radicalization, violence, and extremism. 

She currently serves as the president of the International Control Mastery Therapy Center and serves on the Advisory Board for the Division of Equity and Inclusion at UC Berkeley. Through her family foundation, she has spent two decades spearheading progressive initiatives and voter registration.

As a Board member of I Have a Dream: Oakland foundation, Jessica took a third-grade class in urban Oakland all the way through college (picking up classmates along the way). She also founded and ran a low-fee training clinic in San Francisco that served hundreds of low-income individuals needing long-term therapy, while concurrently training many new psychologists through SFPRG.

For the past two years, Jessica has advised Reach Shirati, which founded an award-winning school in Tanzania. She is also a member of The Mentor Project which serves people internationally, and “Mask the World” which is involved in designing and distributing masks widely during COVID.

Click here to learn more.

As a daughter of the Diaspora; her Jewish Hungarian émigré grandparents owned an embroidery shop in Los Angeles, and their home was a visual mecca filled with art books, bohemian glass, netsukes, and examples of traditional folk textiles from Hungary. Her work reflects a hybrid of these influences along with those of California’s diverse Pacific Rim communities where she was raised and continues to live.

She infuses all of this into her work: a joy of color and experimentation with different mediums–acrylic, gouache, flashe, spray paint, paper, canvas, and found fabrics. She employs methodologies that include painting, collage, cut ups, sewing, intricate pattern cutting, and shaping. In the past few years, she has expanded her paintings into wall installations that she assembles on site. These methods have led to new avenues of exploration and play, creating a cast of evolving characters coalescing one way in one space, only to lead new lives in a future space.

Her work is a conversation, an exploration of color, shape, line, and form. She experiments with different mediums and employ a variety of methodologies–collage, cut ups, juxtaposition–as a way of incorporating chance and cultivating surprise. She is a hunter and gatherer of images, mining the organic and man-made, the history of abstraction, textiles, non-Western cultures, and digital imaging, to bring together a multiplicity of discordant sources. She attempts to locate new ways of knitting together disparate references while questioning how perceptions are created. A fluid relationship with the idea of what beauty can be–stumbling or walking backward into an awkward beauty–is what interests her. This way of working is useful in opening doors, dislocating preconceived outcomes, and enabling shifts of perception and the limitless possibilities they suggest.

 Disparate vocabularies–the language of signifiers, symbols, and patterns–wander through her work. For years she studied dance, and often thinks a more apt word to describe what I do is choreography. Playing with movement and form in two-dimensional space, she tries to engage materials spontaneously, improvisationally, and deliberately. For Sarajo, painting is creating a space that allows for ambiguity and invites experimentation; it’s about possibility and not knowing all the answers.