IG: alanahasenteredthechat
[00:00:01] (Redeait Meaza) Hello everyone my name is Redeait Meaza I am interviewing Alanah Nichole, and my first question for you is, who is Alanah Nichole?
[00:00:13] (Alanah Nichole) Alanah Nichole what a complex question. Ok, I'm such a colorful person and I would call myself a mother, I would call myself an artist, I'll call myself an organizer, very compassionate, empathic person, but very connected to the city of Baltimore.
I come from New York. I was born in the Bronx. Alanah Nichole is someone who was very passionate about human connection, very passionate about arts and culture as a catalyst for change. I'm someone who loves plants. I love..I mean, I don't know what else you want to hear more.
[00:00:58] (Redeait Meaza) No that's all really good. I, I like to ask that kind of question because I feel like you could really just go anywhere with it. So, yeah, that that's all good. I actually need to get some in home plants so I need to get on that. So I definitely like the fact that you're into plants.
(Alanah Nicole) I’m actually very, very close to a plant shop. Very dangerous.
[00:01:27] (Redeait Meaza) Oh yeah. That's convenient. But then it's also like yeah it can definitely be dangerous because then you're going to want to look past it and see if there's anything else you need.
[00:01:39] (Alanah Nichole) It's definitely a habit forming a thing.
[00:01:43] (Redeait Meaza) Mm hmm. I bet I used to have, like a vintage store nearby where I live and they recently just relocated and I'm like, you know, I'm probably saving money that way. But it was nice having it nearby. My next question is, how would you describe your career?
[00:02:12] (Alanah Nichole) My career is evolving. I would say that because I've done so many different things in a short amount of time, I would say. My career is something that has always involved caring for humans. I started out a couple of years ago, I would say in 2014, in outpatient mental health transition to an emergency room nurse tech and the year of the Baltimore uprising. Most folks know it for the year that Freddie Gray was killed. And there were a lot of just different dwellings of emotions between the community and Baltimore. I wasn't necessarily a part of that tight knit community yet, but I definitely felled into it that year I would say 2015-2016, when I got into arts and culture, decided to quit my job and spending all of my time hosting open mics and community engagement events.
So there's been just a huge transition of what that even looked like from 2014 to 2020. So I'm celebrating somewhat of a five year anniversary of being a part of a really beautiful culture and tight knit culture of folks who are just art lovers, music lovers. I love black music. I love to cook all of those things in one pot and so my career, so, so many things. But all in all, I feel like who I am always influences, you know, what my career is or what that comes out as.
[00:03:58] (Redeait Meaza) Yeah, I really like the answer, because just going off of your website, I can tell that this is obviously something you're very passionate about and I always feel like, you know, sometimes people are afraid to go in the art direction because they feel like they can't make a living out of it. But if it's something you're passionate about, you have to be willing to take that risk.
[00:04:25] (Alanah Nichole) Yeah, absolutely. Risk was such a huge factor. I mean, I was, you know, not, you know, I wouldn’t say I am wealthy now, but I'm definitely not as worried about things like money as I was maybe five years ago. And I think that's usually the biggest risk that any entrepreneur or freelancer or artist or anyone who's making money in a way that's just not as traditional, you know, there's always that risk.
[00:04:52] (Redeait Meaza) So do you separate who you are at home and who you are at work? Are you two different people or is are you the same?
[00:05:06] (Alanah Nichole) I'm two different people. I was just describing this with my therapist, but I guess a couple of years ago I created a persona, Alanah Nichole is the persona and at home, to people I'm not necessarily engaged with I am just Alanah. Alanah Nichole is very involved, very extroverted, very outspoken barrier breaking initiatives, building boss a** b**** she can not be stopped. And Alanah is very sweet, not hostile you know. And, you know, she could really do without all of the buzz and she wants to move into a cabin and get a typewriter and she wants a diner and she wants her name to be like Pookie or Tootsie and not Alanah and I thought all of this out. So anyway, right now you're talking to Alanah right now if you want to know.
[00:06:16] (Redeait Meaza) I love it. I love it. I feel like it. I feel like we all should have I guess, like alter ego, for example, like how Beyonce say when she says when she's on stage, she is Sasha Fierce. Who wants to just be the same plain Jane, you know? This might sound crazy to other people, but having like different personalities and different characters, you know, in yourself actually makes life interesting. It helps you to protect yourself.
[00:06:55] (Alanah Nichole) It's definitely something that I, I lean to for safety. You know, when you're out in your community….people want to know that you're functional and that you're producing and that you're you're valuable and you're a good investment, you know, even if it just means I'm coming to your event and that just means your being a little bit different than you would be if you're just walking around the grocery store. When I'm with my children, I have two children, both girls. Their names are Blair and Harper and Blair is eight and Harper is six and clearly have been my mother for almost nine years now -- it will be nine in February. But when I'm with them who I am, when I'm on stage or, you know, when I'm yelling about how much I hate white supremacy are not the same level of passion. It's passion, but it's not all the same.
[00:07:49] (Redeait Meaza) Yeah. Have you always been a creator since you were little or is this something you realized later on in life? Like have you always had that, like, niche of doing something artsy or is it something that you kind of realize you had interest as an adult?
[00:08:10] (Alanah Nichole) You know, I've always been a creative person. I've always been a creator. I can tell you, I've always felt in my performing arts camp. I credit my mother was always having me involved in the arts and music, all of that good stuff. I grew up with music in the home. I grew up with this Autonomy over my self, my body. I was always creating characters. My first character was Jumpseat Jersey. I remember very vividly, you know, actually acting out these things with my imaginary friend. I’m an only child. I've always been someone who was very imaginative, always imagining a world outside of what already exists.
[00:08:59] (Redeait Meaza) I love that you know, I consider myself a creative person. I like sing, songwriter write poems. I've always been into poetry since I was in second grade. I used to have like a journal throughout elementary. And I would just write random poems about like the sky or the sunset, you know? And I think it's because like how your upbringing, how your parents allowed you to be expressive and how your mom would put you in art theater and how you always had music. I kind of had a similar background too. My parents were both really into like jazz music. So, my love for, like, you know, the swings and jazz, soulful music is something I just naturally you grew up listening to and something of that I am very connected to. So, I love the fact that your parents allowed you to be expressive, because I feel like sometimes certain people, depending on how their parents are, they don't allow their kids to be creative and be very free. Relate that back to me, because that's why I definitely wanted to interview you, because I'm like this lady is doing something, I would want to do one day.
[00:10:20] (Alanah Nichole) Yeah, it’s fun.
(Redeait Meaza) So the next question. Who made an impact on your career so you can get to the point where you are now like, did you have an internship? Is it one of those like you being at the right place at the right time? Do you have friends who kind of connected you to someone or is it kind of like you did your research, found an internship like you said, like you had an internship and then you just progressed from there?
[00:11:00] (Alanah Nichole) I am going to say all of those things, you know, since the year that I quoted kind of the beginning, you know, I call this my five year mark right now is like pursuing arts and culture full time.
There's been a series of individuals who have impacted my life in a way that I could never thank them enough for or, you know, bring things to fruition in order to show them how much it's made. But I can pinpoint a couple of people for sure. I think the most important thing, just like we talked about the importance of your parents believing in you and your creativity and your economy and all that good stuff, it's important that you find community members or peers or mentors mentees who believe in you. Belief is such an important thing.
You know, I come up with the wild ideas every single day, and if I have people around you who invalidate your work, you know, who maybe keep it to myself when I saw or any of those things, I can't imagine realizing anything the way that I do. But believe yourself and of course, the most important.
But I'll start with one woman. Her name is Michelle Antoinette. She is a phenomenal black woman. She's someone who looks like herself. She’s someone who had one of the longest running open black run beautiful open mic lasted about 10 years or 11 years and just five right before the pandemic. But prior to that, they had just one month of this event and over 10 years, which is crazy to me, you know, with the exception of like snowstorms and things like that. But she's someone who really taught me a lot about tenacity. She taught me how it's really just staying right at it even though it’s hard. She met me at a time where I was like kind of like a lump of clay I like to describe. I was in a really kind of depressed place after quitting my job. I was living in one room with my entire family, with my mother and my two daughters and myself. We were all sleeping on one air mattress on the floor. And I was feeling pretty down and out about myself because I was like my marriage had failed. I had been married before. I didn't see that my marriage had failed. I have two children. I'm a single mom. I had quit my job. I sounded crazy. No one believed me. And it was kind of like this person was like, I see what you're doing now. You know that I've done this before. I think you should do these things that she took me under her wing. And definitely there was always a there was a meeting halfway with it. It was not that she was giving me things that she made me earn them me the value of certain things and that even as like as a black woman, even though she couldn't give me things very well because of her stature in the community, always made me work for it, because she made me understand that as a black woman, as a as a woman of color, you're not always going to be seen you're not always going to be heard. It's not always going to be commonplace that you have a seat at the table. You have to build it. Sometimes you have to make your own damn chair and she made me struggle for a while. I hated her for it, but now I love her for it. Oh, my God. She's one of those people.
[00:14:44] (Redeait Meaza) I love that. Even for me as an adult, like I'm I'm realizing why my parents would do certain things now. Yeah, it's all making sense. Are there any influencers, celebrities that look up to you? And if so, what is it about them that you admire?
[00:15:37] (Alanah Nichole) As far as celebrities, like people that we all might know there's not a lot of people. This is something that I was talking about the other day with a close friend of mine who's another person who definitely right now is someone that inspires me, Devin Allen. He is local to Baltimore. He just contributed to a book called The Antiracist. But he I was talking to him and I was talking about how I don't subscribe to, like, a celebrity that much and how I try to remain original in my thoughts.
And we talked a lot about how even with social media, I'm definitely addicted to Instagram. But even in that way, Twitter is a place that I struggle to go to because it's so involved and involves so much opinion and it's almost flawless. It's like people just say whatever, wherever an influence is, not something we should take lightly. And I think it's really something to the sobriety of your thoughts, just being with yourself and with your thoughts and understanding what you believe before you understand what everyone else believes. Yeah, I've always struggled with celebrity, like that word, what it means for someone to have that much influence over the way people think and dress and feel and create. Being original is very important, I think, you know, even with school, like always a big part of who I become because I was expelled from Baltimore schools when I was 16.
It's always been something that's stuck with me like that whole thing about plagiarism and how you relate to it and copy people's work. And so, like, when you look at people, you have to know whether, you know, there's no other way not to mimic them or become more like them. But anyway, as far as like people who were like celebrities, by society standards, not so much, but very definitely like those local low key people, you know, some of the greatest people I've ever met have like two hundred followers and have, you know, like a massive amount of followers, some of the most influential people I’ve met don’t even have social media.
[00:18:13] (Redeait Meaza) That is true. That it's true because like Jay-Z he doesn't have anything. Like, he doesn't have an IG. I think sometimes even just taking a break from social media is necessary, like just in general, anything that's very addicting, as always, good to take a detox from.
[00:18:41] (Alanah Nichole) Absolutely.
[00:18:43] (Redeait Meaza) What has been the most rewarding thing that you've done so far in your field?
[00:18:59] (Alanah Nichole) That’s a good question. I'll go with what I've done that's most rewarding, like most recently, I organized an event called The North Avenue Window Joint and it’s a print exhibition mostly photographers, some graphic designers, illustrators. But all of the work were protest related. I've put up a post on Instagram and I wanted to do like call a for artists. I got a response of about maybe nearly 25, 30 people and was able to hang, I think the works of about 20 people this was all done in two weeks. I did it from the time I posted it and for the time that I put it up and go with the effort of other folks as far as going up, I needed help installing a but the thing in particular. And this is just like a huge reminder to me about what I did. What are you doing? Where are you going? Right. Yeah.
But at the opening for the Window joint , I was feeling like super depressed. And I think this is something like a lot of artists, I think we don’t really talk about mental health. But it's still, you know, it's something to be talked about more. But I was like super depressed. I was super manic about it. I was dealing with a breakup from a guy who I wasn't even with then there and he was refusing to come to the show. I was super upset about it. And I just have to push through in that moment when I wanted it to be about myself and I wanted it to be about us whatever that meant. I wanted all of that. But there was a whole community of people that I didn't even see in that moment, like before I pushed through and actually hung the work and allowed people to help me, which is such an important thing.
But I feel like the community just needed this last hurrah this summer. This is like a couple weeks ago. But I really like about a hundred people that came out, beautiful people of all backgrounds and colors and shapes and sizes for me to see them, get their points of view you know, I would have missed out on this if I would’ve made it about me that day.
As selfish as I want to be somedays. I want to be Alanah and not Alanah Nichole. I think people would have really missed out beautiful moment and even still to this day and it's only been a couple of weeks, I'm seeing new pictures surfaced from the opening pictures of community faces I didn't get to see when I was there. I mean, it's just so rewarding. It's rewarding seeing people validate your work by coming out to your event. Nobody had to show up. I used to say when I started doing events -- even if one person shows to the event it was successful. I’ve done whole shows in front of two people and I have done shows in front of hundreds of people. Either way, it just makes it worth it and rewarding to see people that believe in you.
[00:22:33] (Redeait Meaza) Yeah, that all sounds amazing.
[00:22:37] (Alanah Nichole) Even if that one a** hole didn’t show up.
[00:23:04]( Redeait Meaza) Screw him, his loss. Do you feel like there is a lack of art representation in communities like Baltimore and or the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area? If yes, why do you feel that way? And do you think that there's a lack of funding?
[00:23:37] (Alanah Nichole) So do I feel like there's a lack of representation first? The time you're looking at it? I think I'm studying. I'm getting my master's in social design right now. And like social design is like the study of solving complex human problems creatively in that study.
We talk about looking at things like analyzing a situation, like what's the problem statement. I think we all do this in a different way, like throughout liberal arts. But when we look at a problem or look, you have a certain demographic of people looking at a problem, you're going to see it a certain way.
So there's definitely a lack of representation when it comes to large institutions like the museums and arts organizations and nonprofits and all of that. When you talk about that? Well, as far as people like black and brown people, specifically like black women, I can only speak to that. You don't see a lot of black women executive directors. You don't see a lot of black women as philanthropists. You don't see that in philanthropy it is especially pretty white. It's especially very pale. And when you do black women, they don't last long because the culture of these organizations is just fucking hostile and it's just not healthy for any very tender, very beautiful, intelligent black woman to be in. And so, like, yeah, there's a lack of representation when it comes to institutions. But if you're not be heard, seen or felt, I can also see that sometimes it's about self preservation and starting your own things and being representative of your own thing in your own organizations, in your own initiatives.
It's just as important when it comes to that we're fucking represented. But when it comes to doing your own thing, starting your own way, starting your organization in terms of raising funds. I've done that. I've done every corner of it. And there's definitely representation when you talk about that as far as a lack of funding. Yeah, there's a lack of funding, but there's not a lack of imagination and the lack of funding is not a lack of will. And when you have all of those things with a little bit of like humanity, you're able to do just about anything. So, like, you need millions of dollars to do these beautiful things that many black people do every like in a city like Baltimore, because I think most of us will never see that money. Realistically, you know, we can we can look for it. We can advocate for it. I think we need it. Yes, I think we deserve it. Yes.
Like,It would be cool. But like, this culture, this urban culture that happens, like you sort of make the mistakes in people's homes or people just kind of being in Mongolia, you don't have it for five dollars a slice, absolute dinners. I've done everything there is to do in order to make it happen. And you can't take that away from black people. You can't you can't stop that kind of growth. You can't back and imagination.
[00:27:29] (Redeait Meaza) I love that. I love the fact that you said there is not a lack of imagination, because that's very true. There's a lot of creative people out there just trying to figure out a way to have there are being known, presented and just, you know. Be able to be that person to help others. So I definitely agree with you on that. And where do you see yourself in 10 years and why would you want your legacy to be? And is there anything else you would like me to know about you that I haven't gotten to you.
[00:28:57] (Alanah Nichole) In 10 years, I would like to be soft. I mean, I just I see now that I'm like five years old. There's a propensity among creatives, even though this is supposed to be a really fun, you know, sort of a lot of people look at it as like the liberal hipster thing to be doing to be a full time artist or to be a or like however they want to describe it, because there's this capacity to be heard, to be really cynical about the future of the arts because of the lack -- always thinking about things and like a deficit based way. And I hope that I can maintain my relationship to being imaginative.
I hope that in my legacy, you know, people know that there's always stuff, you know, and it doesn't matter. Like whatever it is you have, like there's always space. Arts and culture is like one big potluck. And it's just it's such a beautiful dinner every night. Any time people are getting together in the name of art, it's it's a beautiful day. And, you know, I hope that people know in my legacy that it doesn't matter like where you're at and it doesn't matter if you don't fucking know where you're going, because a lot of times you just don't know. Yeah, you won't know and you can't know. But you just have to trust your gut and you have to trust that belief is key. Transparency is key. That's something that I used to sing a lot. And I hope that I take with me everywhere is that you're worthy and deserving of the love that the universe has for you and that, you know, whatever is coming comes through practice. Something that I picked up when I was doing a whole lot of yoga, which I don't do anymore. I should do.
[00:31:12] (Redeait Meaza) I love it. I love that. Yeah. How do you meditate? Because that's actually something I like doing that I need to do.
[00:31:28] (Alanah Nichole) Yeah, I need to meditate. I actually meditate people more than meditation. It's actually something I do because when you should have been contacted for about four plus years. So I decided that yes, I love that, I love that.
[00:31:48] (Redeait Meaza) That's something I'm going to work on adding on to my life. But thank you so much for speaking with me and taking the time to really give the real responses to these interview questions. I created these interview questions to really cater to you and what I felt like you would be able to elaborate and give insightful information. So I really appreciate you taking the time because I know you have two kids because I read that on your bio on your website so I can only imagine how busy your days be. We will keep in touch. Can you tell the people where they can reach you?
[00:32:48] (Alanah Nichole) Of course, and thank you.
alanahnichole.com
IG: alanahasenteredthechat