We are more than halfway through Black History Month, a time when we recognize and celebrate members of the African diaspora who’ve played a central role in history and society. Though Black History Month originally began as a U.S. holiday, countries around the world — including Ireland, the United Kingdom and Canada — now devote February to honoring Black history, too.
Web3 is understood as the future of the internet, so what we build today will become the history of tomorrow. Here in the Web3 space, it’s important to recognize the Black creators who are, in essence, making history in real-time. Ahead, we share a non-exhaustive list of those communities and individuals.
Special thanks: Thank you to our list curator, multimedia artist Brittany Pierre.
You might recognize this artist from the BFF You NFT collection! Jade Purple Brown is an artist living in New York City. Her work uses strong figures, vibrant colors, and messages of optimism to create new, dynamic worlds of individuality and empowerment. Her artistic practice spans across Illustration, Design, and Creative Direction, and has attracted a wide range of global clients. Learn more on her website.
Find this epic surrealist artist's 16 collections on Foundation.
Exploring minimalism and emotions, Faith Love is an Atlanta-based artist whose work can be found on SuperRare.
This 18-year-old digital artist has been featured in Teen Vogue and Fortune's NFTy 50. View her work on SuperRare.
Ghanaian-born, California-based Kwame Michael was featured in TimePieces and can be collected on Foundation and OpenSea.
Linda is an artist, designer, and curator whose transdisciplinary practice explores the relationship between the immaterial and the material. You can find her work on Foundation and Manifold.
This creator, artist and teacher has worked with major brands like Adobe and Lyft, while also finding success in the NFT space for her animated city scapes. Learn more on her website.
View this multimedia artist's collections on Foundation and learn about Forbidden Fruit, a curatorial collective dedicated to art, wellness and immersive experiences.
This self-taught, multidisciplinary artist just dropped a new collection, EVERGREEN, on Zora. Johnson's pieces often incorporate vibrant colors and recurring themes of Afrocentrism and Afrofuturism, surrealism, the Divine Feminine, body positivity, sex positivity, cannabis, and queerness.
Jah is a filmmaker and visual artist from Brooklyn, NY who creates in the style of contemporary futurism. Find Jah's work on Zora, Foundation, Rarible and Known Origin.
Emonee LaRussa is a motion graphics artist predominantly creating music visuals for artists like Kanye West, Lil Nas x, Meg thee Stallion, and more. This 2x Emmy Award-winning artist dropped her genesis piece on SuperRare and has a collection on Nifty Gateway.
This 3D animator, who has worked for Adult Swim, Vogue, Netflix and Snapchat, auctioned a piece at Christie's in July 2022.
Web3 musicians have found themselves in something of a tooling renaissance, with new platforms cropping up across the space to help artists create new economic models around fan engagement. While significant imbalances still exist, affecting distribution and capital flow, Web3 musicians generated over $25 billion in 2021 and continue to build audiences across the internet.
Don't miss out on the innovation coming from these Web3 music artists:
Today, countless Black creatives and Web3 early adopters are working in collaboration to advance humankind’s relationship to art, technology and each other. It's important that Web3 recognizes this fact.
"I hadn't heard anyone talking about any plans to honor Black creatives in the space, and we know how unserved and underserved creatives can be looked over," wrote Pierre in a statement shared with BFF. "Especially Black creatives," Pierre said. "I have spent the past two years carving out a safe space for Black creatives and knew this slight could not go unseen."
So Pierre tweeted about it, expressing a desire to curate a show that would commission African American artists. Within minutes, a project was assembled. "I chose artists in the space that I know have been working towards growing in their artistry and championing access in web3. Music, photography, 3D, AI, graphic design and motion design are all included and shows how vast our talent is," wrote Pierre in the statement.
If you haven’t already, be sure to check out Pierre's upcoming project, THE LET OUT, a series of timed open editions by Black artists. Created in collaboration with the NFT ecosystem Zora, its community-led platform Zoratopia and BLVKHVND cofounder Sirsu, Pierre’s project selected nine featured artists who will receive 1 ETH and mint open editions starting February, 2023.
Megan DeMatteo is BFF’s Guest Editor.
This is not financial advice. If you don't want to spend money investing in crypto or Web3 — you don’t have to. The intent of this article is to help others educate themselves and learn.
