Tomorrow evening, the Houston art collective Otabenga Jones & Associates (OJ&A) will officially unveil a new mural at Lawndale Art Center. A project of Creative Capital, the mural kicks off The People’s Plate, OJ&A’s year-long collaborative art project/public health program. Programs at Lawndale and other venues will include cooking classes, a foraging workshop, an urban gardening workshop, an instructional cooking video and a line of mass-produced lunchboxes that will be made available to the public. OJ&A cite the Black Panther Free Breakfast for School Children Program as inspiration for the program. The artwork for both the mural and the upcoming lunchboxes are inspired by the graphic art of the Black Panther’s Minister of Culture, Emory Douglas.
OJ&A may need more than four members (who are Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans, and Robert A. Pruitt) because it will be a busy year: next month, the collective will open Monuments: Right Beyond the Site at Project Row Houses (PRH), in which they will utilize all seven of the Art Houses for PRH’s Round 40 through installations that happen on and off-site.
