The Black Family Archive Pop Up was a weekend-long activation in October 2021 by The Black Image Center, hosted by Community Build. It celebrated the Black legacy of LA’s Leimert Park neighborhood, and honored the power of memory, legacy, and family. Through one on one sessions with professional archivists, participants were invited to document their own family by bringing in photos to print and digitize images as a way to preserve the individual and collective Black visual archive.
The event held space for Black folks to study our familial visual languages, remember our ancestors, and learn how to become better stewards of our legacies. Questions like “What do your ancestors look like?” and “We are so displaced, but who is keeping track?” were posed to participants as they worked alongside professional Black archivists from The Gates Preserve to print and digitize images from their family archives.
