The Black Lunch Table Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

January 11, 6-9 PM

No RSVP necessary.

Join current Triangle AIR Heather Hart for this iteration of the Black Lunch Table’s Wikipedia Edit-a-thon focusing on important but underrepresented New York area visual artists of the African Diaspora. A training session will be held at the beginning, but help is available throughout the event.

Please bring your laptop and feel free to bring a friend! Free to attend, RSVP recommended. 

More about the Black Lunch Table: Organized around literal and metaphorical lunch tables, Black Lunch Table takes the lunchroom phenomenon as its starting point. The Wikipedia edit-a-thons BLT stages mobilize a collective authoring of a specific set of articles (those pertaining to the lives and works of black artists). Currently, 85% of Wikipedia editors are male and 77% of Wikipedia editors are white. BLT reserves space to encourage more editors of color, more women editors and a space for white male editors to focus on a subject that might otherwise slip through historical gaps.

The Black Lunch Table (BLT), first staged in 2005, is an ongoing collaboration between visual artist and School of the Art Institute of Chicago professor Jina Valentine, and New York based public artist Heather Hart. The BLT’s primary aim is the production of discursive sites, wherein cultural producers engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues. BLT mobilizes a democratic (re)writing of contemporary history by animating discourse around and among the people living it. As the past few years have seen the most public dialogue around issues of race in recent history, BLT has provided a critical platform for exchange, currently staging nomadic Wikipedia edit-a-thons and community roundtable discussions worldwide.

In 2016, BLT received two Wikimedia Foundation Rapid Grants, Creative Capital Emerging Fields Award, and a UNC Institute of Arts and Humanities (IAH) Digital Innovation Grant to technically and fiscally support the development and launch of our online database project. BLT seeks to cultivate a legacy and further explore its potential to serve as an intergenerational bridge, fostering a more thorough historical record, conversation and collaboration.