On April 29, 2025, Grammy-winning musician Corinne Bailey Rae joined artist Amanda Williams at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art to celebrate the release of Williams’s book What Black Is This, You Say?. That evening, surrounded by Williams’s artwork from her exhibition We Say What Black This Is, Rae and Williams led a conversation on identity, creativity, and Black expression.
The event was more than a book launch, though. It also marked the culmination of a semester-long collaboration across Spelman’s campus, uniting music, visual art, and dance.
“This work comes at an important time, when Black women and femmes face evolving familiar challenges that require more of us,” she said. “And still, we rest. We look inward. We create.” – Spelman Dance Performance and Choreography Lecturer Lyrric Jackson
Spelman’s Department of Dance Performance and Choreography students participated in this exploration. Their final exam performance, Inscribed: New Visions of Black Femme Freedom, was influenced by Rae’s album Black Rainbows, which was inspired by Rae’s experiences at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago and delves into themes of Black history, spirituality, and identity.
“In line with the mission of our department, students were challenged to reckon with the complexities that exist within the boundlessness of the Black Feminine Divine, ” explained Spelman Dance Performance and Choreography Lecturer Lyrric Jackson.
Amanda Williams’s exhibition, We Say What Black This Is, on view at the Spelman Museum through May 24 also shaped the students’ approach. The exhibition challenges reductive definitions of Blackness and celebrates its diversity, resilience, and depth.
“When we were speaking with Amanda about the show, the biggest draw to working with Spelman was having an engagement with the students,” Dr. Liz Andrews, executive director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, said. “Amanda and I pushed [Curator] Karen [Comer Lowe] to work with students in a meaningful way to engage her practice.”
Hence, the dance performance, which was staged in Spelman’s new Center for Innovation and the Arts.
“It was a conversation about creativity across artistic practices,” Andrew said of the collaboration between Williams and Rae and Spelman dance students. “We so often think of artists as making their work in a void, but think about the Harlem Renaissance. People were going to visit each other’s studios, exchanging ideas at the Salons. There were poets, painters, and sculptors all making work at the same time and supporting one another. This event was an opportunity to demonstrate that type of exchange with two powerful Black women artists.
The April 29 event brought these intersecting threads into focus. Rae’s presence on campus amplified the themes students had been exploring all semester and served as a full-circle moment, validating the students’ use of Black Rainbows as creative fuel.
For Jackson, the impact was clear. “This work comes at an important time, when Black women and femmes face evolving familiar challenges that require more of us,” she said. “And still, we rest. We look inward. We create.”
