The magic of Brooklyn for me has always been rooted in the cultural expansiveness of its people. The diversity of Blackness and internationality is like a constellation representing the best of human expression.

The fact that you can sit in one place in BK for hours and connect with a hundred different ethnicities–it makes you truly feel like you are living in the world, not just in a city of it.

This is why whatever happens in BK rapidly influences the world. Everyone who lives here is like an international radio station.

The Magnetic Pull of Genius Creativity

The people I was drawn to here more than anyone were the Nigerian Artists that clustered around a certain ideological hub.

It was the Artists who infused indigenous sensibility with social justice and creative innovation. It was the Artists who gave their entire being to their work. Work that intentionally healed, uplifted, empowered everyone identifying as Black from Panama City to Tokyo to Kinshasa to Oakland, all gathered in Senegalese- or Nigerian- or Jamaican-owned eateries/spots straddling the line between Crown Heights and Bed Stuy.

The Artists I was fortunate to connect deeply with all clustered around a Brooklyn icon that not enough is known about: Wunmi Olaiya. By some magic, Wunmi magnetizes transformative artists from every corner of the globe. Every significant artist in NY is only two degrees of separation from Wunmi at max.

A Portal to Creative Fulfillment

I have to center her in this piece about my adoration for /obsession with Brooklyn because Wunmi truly made Brooklyn for me. She made BK home for me, and I know that she does this–without thinking about it–for so many Artists.

Almost every NY creative I know, I met through Wunmi or through someone I met through Wunmi.

A luxury fashion designer who most recently worked on Burna Boy’s Grammy’s performance, Wunmi is a paragon of the positive impact that is possible with Brooklyn Artists when mastery meets community meets vision.

My dream is to see a fashion institution led by Wunmi’s teachings, but in the meantime, I believe we can look at her example to think about how Artists shape and mold communities.

An Infinite Web of Creative Cultivation

At the center of Wunmi’s family-run, luxury fashion brand is Adire, an indigenous textile made in West Africa. From the process of design to construction to marketing to selling, she employs and inspires people across multiple continents, all generations and infinite realms of creative production. She is also a recording artist, dancer and performer who has toured all over the world.

The people who gather at Wunmi’s booths at BAM, IAFF or other Brooklyn festivals come from across the country and across the globe, but New York locals are a significant chunk of her audience/customer base.

As she travels across the country and the world sharing the story and the magic of Adire, she weaves together communities of tastemakers, fashion collectors, creatives and change makers who value handmade luxury wear and sustainable fashion.

Artist Communities as Commercial Markets

To be a Wunmi customer/collector is to be of a particular ilk. When you buy and wear her pieces, you are initiating the membership process into a highly-connected, socially transformative, highly-accomplished community.

As Wunmi’s community includes thousands of Brooklyn Artists, that core cluster community feeds and receives from creative pipelines throughout the city and across the world.

We buy and sell from each other. We exchange information, we educate each other. We provide each other with space, professional opportunities, communion/fellowship, entertainment, joy/beauty, grants…

This is the natural evolution of a community that clusters around shared values, beliefs, hopes and dreams. This particular community is magnetized toward the visual, sonic, energetic frequency that epitomizes Wunmi’s work.

We call her Iyalode, which in Yoruba means Village Mother. She is just one of many nuclei of creative capital in Brooklyn. If you’re an Artist reading this, I’m sure you can name one or many.

Brooklyn, the Epicenter of Creativity

Ultimately this is what makes Brooklyn. This is what makes Brooklyn undefeated. The vibrancy and charge of her creative class–pumping into the education pipelines, the economic roller coaster, the social tapestry all over the borough and thus, all over the world.

What this teeming creative class has never had is a centralized digital hub where they could find each other, collaborate, get schmoney together. Such a platform could catalyze the creative economy for sustainable Artist thriving by operationalizing and thus infusing/exponentially multiplying what Artists intrinsically do: support each other.

This is what the Brooklyn Innovation Portal is addressing, among other key needs.

In future pieces, we’ll talk more about how it will work and how you can benefit.