The Scale of a Revolution
What do you think it takes to start a revolution? Dr. Nnaemeka Ekwelum is an independent artist, researcher, program developer, and educator with a PhD in Black Studies from Northwestern University, but he didn’t always see himself as a Changemaker. As a kid, a Black teacher at his predominantly white private school pulled him aside at lunch during his junior year. He noticed something in the way Ekwelum showed up in the school’s diversity club thoughtful, opinionated, with a quiet instinct for bringing people in rather than shutting them out. The teacher told him directly: you have things to say, and you have a desire to include people in the work. That is the sign of a leader. You need to start developing that now. Dr. Ekwelum wasn’t sure he was ready, but the nudge set something in motion that has never stopped.
Today, Dr. Ekwelum describes himself as a “Chicago-based cultural worker,” a title that holds multitudes. He travels across the Black diaspora, to Mozambique, Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria, Brazil, Trinidad, studying the ways Black artists and cultural workers are creating and producing work in response to the political conditions of their own communities. He is interested in how Black people are moving through experiences of anti-Blackness, responding to the lingering vestiges of colonialism, and finding points of connection across vastly different contexts in the world then bringing those lessons home to Chicago. Weaving through all of it is a single animating question: how does art allow us to tap into our politics in a different way, and move people to feel through this moment we are living in so that we can respond to it?
His fiber art practice grew the same way so much of his life has, through friendship. In grad school, he met Boston artist Stephen Hamilton, a weaver who had studied with Nigerian women weavers in Nigeria. Hamilton noticed Ekwelum was always stitching plastic lacing, the kind kids use to make friendship bracelets and keychains. He offered to teach him to weave with it. That small act of generosity opened a practice that has grown into something extraordinary: woven textiles, soft sculptures, site-specific wall installations, and mixed material works that have been exhibited nationally and internationally.
One of those pieces, American’t, is among the most powerful things he has made and one of the hardest. He started it in 2018, inspired by a student at a youth prison in Boston where he taught art. The student had painted an American flag, vertical, with Black and brown hands gripping the stripes like the bars of a prison cell. Ekwelum looked at it and felt something was off and realized that was exactly the feeling the flag should produce, if we are being honest about what it represents. He spent eight years making his own response in one piece. The piece is long and luminous, woven from that same plastic lacing material that symbolizes childhood and friendship, beautiful from a distance, seductive in its shimmer. Up close, where the stars should be, there are military tags. Each one carries the name and story of a Black or Brown child who was a victim of structural violence. One was shot and killed at a gas station at 18 for being openly gay. Another was arrested at 18 for protesting a school resource officer’s excessive force against a fellow student. The piece is currently on display in conjunction with the United States’ 250th anniversary, a context Ekwelum notes with pointed awareness.
He struggled with American’t for years, worried that from afar it would read as patriotic rather than as the memorial and indictment it is. He calls this tension the “double voice,” two distinct meanings living in the same work. He has since made peace with it. When you work from a place of integrity and intention, he says, the energy translates. People will feel the meaning of it.
That same spirit of friendship and bridging difference animates AfroDisco Social Hour, the community project he cofounded with his friend Alexandria Eregbu. In 2024, the project produced an exhibition on Black roller-skating culture across the Midwest, partnering with a local rink for a closing event that raised enough money to build an outdoor skating rink behind the gallery, a permanent community resource!
When asked what makes a Changemaker, Dr. Ekwelum doesn’t hesitate: courage, conviction, and vision. He believes there is a reason authoritarian leaders attack the arts, because art is what grows the imagination, and without imagination, people cannot begin to conceive of a world beyond the one they are living in. It is not enough, he says, to know what you are fighting against. You have to know what you are fighting for.
For young people who feel the pull toward change but don’t know where to start, Dr. Ekwelum offers something quieter than a call to action. He believes if you can shift the way one person thinks that is also impact. That is also the work. Start where you are, he says. Study what you love. Try small acts of vulnerability, share your art with three people, say hello to a stranger, befriend someone new. Build your capacity for showing up. Not everyone has to be the big splash. Start the first domino. Dr. Ekwelum’s story reflects the limitless potential housed in one act of courage after another.
