An exciting night at Gallery Aferro highlighting Collaborate Audio Lab’s youth music program Newark In Tune as students of the program perform for their family, friends, and the local community. From left, Rodney, Cielo, De’Seana, Xiomara, Paola, Alex, & Hezekiah. Backdrop by Getlostalot

Donate to Gallery Aferro

What if we talked about community power as often as we talk about community need? We’re asking you to seize your power, and make amazing things happen at Gallery Aferro by donating online today. 

Commit to the radical act of imagining the future, tomorrow, or next year, and to shaping it collectively. It is also very easy to set up automatic monthly giving in any amount.

We want to keep making space for people to find their power, whether by making art, initiating programs, understanding themselves and people around them in new ways, and by asking questions about what can be possible. If you want to mail a donation, or have your company match a donation, please note our mailing address at the bottom of this page.

Here are some questions we ask each year.

• What if we were all worthy of joy? Check out our TEDx talk about art, audience, community, power dynamics, resistance, and the “strange and enduring power of arts experiences” such as the Aferro Mobile Portrait Studio.
• What if you could bend time? A college student leans across an aisle at a November gallery poetry program, to ask Henry Dumas’ widow, Loretta Dumas, about life, art and justice in the 1960’s. The decades collapse as we talk about what has and hasn’t changed. Artist Jo-El Lopez’s work, The Kiss at the 16th Avenue Baptist Church, evokes a time-transcending space of love and resistance.
• What if we were more powerful than we knew? Organizing initiatives and events proves to young people and others that they are capable of important, powerful work. Our zinefest organized by the Bettyz, a collective of young women of color, created a space entirely centered around the voices of female and LGBTQ creators.
• What if another world is possible? We can make that world every day when artists with disabilities can breakdance from sheer happiness at their solo exhibit, when a girl scout troop leader says, surveying 50 visiting scouts working with art and technology, “it feels good in here,” when artists who are parents can access our residencies equitably.
• What if nothing was lost and memory was collectively held? The experience of creating our exhibit, Kea’s Ark of Newark: a Life in Works has been unlike any other we’ve done before. In this exhibit, the typical power dynamics of a curated show are inversed: the public tells us what the objects are, what they mean. And the show has continued to grow and change, rather than staying fixed, as people continue to come forward with their ark ephemera. Check out this video feature on the exhibit from NJTV State of the Arts.
• What if we could talk to each other, even when we’re different? Your fully tax deductible end of year donation will be used to make next year full of meaningful, varied opportunities for people to gather, think, talk, and listen.

Thank you so very much,
Evonne M. Davis and Emma Wilcox, Directors

Mailing Address: PO Box 5668 Newark NJ 07105

Gladys Barker Grauer speaking to a huge crowd during the emotional dedication of Gallery Aferro’s 2nd Floor Gallery to the late Eleta J. Caldwell and Rodney M. Gilbert. From left, artists and community members Danielle Scott, Nettie Thomas, Bisa Washington, Gladys Barker Grauer, and Gallery Aferro Artistic Director Evonne M. Davis.