For BIPOC BY BIPOC!

The Vancouver BIPOC-CA - Black & Indigenous People of Colour Creative Association is a newly formed non-profit grassroots collective in solidarity to reclaim space and create equity in the creative industry. We are artists for artists. We are BIPOC for BIPOC. 

For BIPOC by BIPOC, we are here to reclaim our voices, empower our talented creatives, and occupy our space within the Arts & Culture industry of our city and province. Our main goal is to organize and collaborate with our youths and women in our community.

This association marks empowerment and investment of reform for local Black & Indigenous creatives and the overall BC creative industry. We are an umbrella organization that helps open the doors for creatives to have access to space for BIPOC-CA creatives with the following:

• Workshops

• Events

• Resource Centre/Networking platform

• Building tools and resources (access to creative spaces)

• Equipment for rent or borrow

• Donations

• Grant Applications

• Blog

In order to truly reclaim our voice and address the perpetuations of our identities for profit, we have to name the systemic racism that has been designed to subdue our passion and development. We counter the acts of normalizing the denial and erasure of our historic and current presence. The deep impacts of the denial and erasure is by no means permanent. It is through the efforts of this organization, and many beautiful people that overcome the challenges of colonization, that we continually embrace, promote, fund, and support the Culture & Arts by Indigenous and Black People of Color.

Our efforts have resulted in creating an agency that allows Indigenous Black and People of Color to have space, funding, resources, and collaboration with an agency that is founded by people who are Indigenous and People of Color. That is why we created BIPOC. We seek to fund and support artists with their own authentic endeavours.

“By the Culture for the Culture”

The BIPOC-CA Story

Audiences have heard and laughed, but not all have listened or learned. With no remorse there was no resource so we became the source.

How the past is remembered matters. And how the future turns out it’s up to us.

Erasure and denial are central to the construction of national identity. Racism is defined as the conditioning of the human mind, body, culture, psychology, and institution. Scholar Stuart Hall, Jamaican-born British Sociologist, notes how the personification of unity and difference, or rather visibility and difference, produce modern racism.

When history is erased and denied, it creates a certain type of nation.A nation where Black and Indigenous communities are reframed as immigrants and terrorists. We are more than a footnote in history. We are alive today. We are not victims, we are survivors and we belong in society. We live, laugh, love, cry, hurt, celebrate and we can express Art & Culture through our human experiences. Most importantly, mother nature has enchanted us with her wisdom from our ancestors and elders. We are here.

We can unravel racism and trauma with the truth of our historical societal experiences while getting back to our roots. We can decode the colonizing language and comprehend the molecule structure that depicts everyone as inhuman or racialize, while the innocent bystander is not innocent and stays unmarked. We must come to conclusion of how these definitions function in the systems of classification and disenfranchise and dismissed voices within Vancouver Arts & Culture. There is a significant difference between observing art as Indigenous or Black versus appreciating art by Indigenous and Black People of Colour, and for the artist to be directly credited.