Black in Denver is an art-based research project that explores people and place. The series, which started in 2018 and culminated in 2020, features friends, strangers, public figures, and community members all answering the same question:

What does it mean to you to be Black in Denver?

Born from crisis and curiosity, this work is research; it is an archive, a photo diary, and most importantly, a visual tribute to the beauty and plurality of Blackness. It draws links between individuality, compassion, and community. It poetically imagines a future where all Black people are safe to find out who they are and be it.

The experiences reflected in this 100-portrait series offer only a glimpse into Denver’s Black community. Yet they colorfully weave the individual and the spiritual with philosophical, sociological, and political questions to explore opportunities for connection.

To date, the project has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (MCA), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), Colorado Photographic Arts Center (CPAC), History Colorado, Arvada Center for the Arts & Humanities, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, among others.

Narkita is a researcher and interdisciplinary conceptual artist who works with image, text, and textiles. Her projects entangle the political and the spiritual and weave the past and the present in search of catharsis.

I honor and acknowledge that I am on the traditional territories and ancestral homelands of the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute nations.