East St. Louis Community Table
The East St. Louis Community Table is representing three cultural organizations headquartered in East St. Louis - the Sunshine Cultural Arts Center, the Community Archive, and the East Side Arts Collective.
The Sunshine Cultural Arts Center believes a holistic cultural arts curriculum provides the tools necessary for our youth to succeed in life and bring positive change to their community. For this reason we opened the Sunshine Cultural Arts Center in 2013. This former elementary school is a crucial safe haven where lives are changed. Since its inception we have grown to include nationally recognized, award-winning programs such as Harmony Project and Catalyst, a member of the Brave New Voices network. Working with the East St. Louis School District, local community organizations and civic leaders we believe in the power of collaboration. At the center, young people have opportunities to engage in a variety of cultural, art-based expressions, participate in supervised recreational activities, and receive life-skills mentoring and academic tutoring. Youth and families are also connected to the community resources they require.
The East Side Arts Collective is a collective of artists, makers and creatives. Our members include muralists, singers, composers, fabric artists, writers, actors, sculptors, photographers, painters, and Hip Hop artists, all of who count East St. Louis, Illinois as home and the four decades old Sunshine Cultural Arts Center as home base.
The Community Archive
My name is Dr. Treasure Shields Redmond, and I am the founder and Executive Director of The Community Archive. My roots are in two places: Meridian, Mississippi where my mother — a visual artist — raised me to be a reader and lover of African American literature, and East St. Louis, Illinois where my father — a poet and photographer — created the world’s largest collection of images of Black writers which is now housed at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. My parents taught me to be a culture keeper, and as such, an archivist of community stories.
Archival work is Black feminist work. It is an act of communal mothering. It is an act of conjuring in the tradition of hoodoo, where the ancestors are always called to account.
When the writer Alice Walker recovered, the remains of folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, that was archival work.
After the Ferguson uprising, in 2014, I created a podcast, entitled Who Raised You? in collaboration with my friend, Jia Lian Yang. It is an archive of stories of activists, educators, and creatives, who all took part in direct actions and protests during the Ferguson uprising.
In 2015, I delved into poetry as an archive I completed chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer, which is a poetry book in the voice of Proto-feminist, civil rights warrior Fannie Lou Hamer.
In the midst of the pandemic, I created the podcast The Memoir My Dad Wouldn’t Write, which is a conversation with my father, Dr. Eugene B. Redmond. The episodes are exchanges that talk through my fathers 85+ years chronologically. We cover his incredible life as a Black Arts Movement poet, one of the architects of black studies, and more.
Presently, I am collecting the stories of descendants of survivors of the 1917 East St. Louis Race massacre.
An archivist is defined as an information professional who assesses, collects, organizes, preserves, maintains control over, and provides access to records and archives determined to have long-term value.
