(Image: Black Arts Love)
(Image: Black Arts Love)
The overhaul of Pagliacci’s Pike/Pine pizza headquarters has made new space for black art and community on Capitol Hill.
Black Arts Love — “a welcoming community space that is inclusive to all that support our mission of amplifying and uplifting black artists” — is now open in the 400 block of E Pike neighboring the Seattle pizza maker’s slice bar and “Center for Excellence” that opened in a 2020 overhaul of the company’s Capitol Hill headquarters.
The new venue is a mix of arts, retail, and community gathering from an organization that has grown through prop-up events and the leadership of founder Malika Bennett.
Bennett has said she created Black Arts Love out of a response to police killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016:
It was so traumatizing seeing those videos online. I noticed so many people were feeling like they wanted to do something, but we were feeling hopeless. How do we get this to stop? At the time, I was working in corporate America just figuring things out, and I just had a come to Jesus moment. I asked myself, what can we do to really feel more empowered to get healing into our community? Then, a dream came to me about this big group of really brilliant, excellent, Black leaders that came together and were standing around this table and looking at this blueprint of action.
Bennett said she started Black Arts Love events that summer with the first market held at the Garfield Community Center in the Central District.
Black Arts Love has grown to work with a thousand black artists and prides itself as “a catalyst for community building, healing and social justice.”
The new Capitol Hill venue now gives it a core for its schedule of marketplaces, networking events, and community art classes. Black Arts Love has also grown to provide marketing and small business resources for artists and creators.
The growth of black arts and community spaces around Capitol Hill and the Central District appears to be one of the positive outcomes from the activism, frustration, and trauma born out of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and harsh Seattle Police response.
The arrival of Black Arts Love on Capitol Hill follows the debut of Arté Noir at 23rd and Union where the new Central District arts center focused on “Black art, artists, and culture” became a surprising anchor tenant for the new development on the corner after drugstore chain Bartell’s backed out.
And another community and arts organization Heartful Rootz has said it intends to open a space on Capitol Hill though has had difficulty so far securing a lease, its first step in a multi-year plan in the city it says will include community gardens, assistance services for “Black, Indigenous, and people of the global majority” businesses, a restaurant with food from a community farm, an education center and cooperative living spaces.
Black Arts Love, meanwhile, celebrated its grand opening over the past weekend and is now settling in to becoming part of the E Pike mix.
Black Arts Love is opens Wednesday through Sundays at 417 E Pike. For hours and more information, visit blackartslove.com.
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