Adreinne Waheed
The Audacity to Thrive
audacious [aw-dey-shuhs]
1). extremely bold or daring; recklessly brave; fearless.
2). extremely original; without restriction to prior ideas; highly inventive.
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To have the audacity or to be audacious means that one is shamelessly bold and unafraid to resist conventional ways of thinking and living. In many ways, Black people continue to represent the epitome of audacity as we consistently defy the restrictions of a white patriarchal society. Despite the barrage from racist systems, we continue to gather, we still adorn our bodies, we still love each other.
For the last four decades, Adrienne Waheed has captured the many ways that Black people around the globe live audaciously. At 13, she began making brilliant images of both the magnificence and the mundane of Black life. As a practicing visual artist and photographer, Waheed employs her lens to craft images of extraordinary Black living – traversing cultural and civic spaces, like Afropunk, Jouvert, and ongoing Black Lives Matter protests to reveal the ways in which Black communities leverage fashion, play, music, and our collective pursuit of joy and love as necessary sites for resistance.
The Audacity to Thrive utilizes the literal definition of the term “audacious” as a lens through which to survey Waheed’s visualization of African descendent peoples and our audacity to not only live, but to most importantly THRIVE. ​
Audacious Resistance
1). Having the audacity to call out systems of oppression; also being inclined to keep all receipts.​
2). The ability to knuck when another individual or group of persons buck.
Resistance is necessary in Black life. From braiding rice into our hair for sustenance during the Middle Passage, to breaking tools to stall the plantation work day, resistance was a Black tradition well before we yelled Black Power! Waheed examines the various ways that we resist and challenge oppressive systems.
Audacious Joy
“When you live under the control of a white supremacist system that tells you that your skin, your hair, your body, your natural way of being is wrong or an aberration, the audacity to live, thrive and be joyful is resistance.”
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- Adrienne Waheed, 2020 ​​
Audacious Love
1). Having the audacity to be vulnerable with one’s heart.
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Love in itself is a verb not an adjective. As James Baldwin says, “Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does. Love is a battle, love is a war; love is a growing up.”
Waheed captures the various ways that Black people construct spaces where we can be seen, recognized and accepted in all our fullness. To that end, Waheed’s works show how love liberates.