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This feature is a continuation of our series on the transformative capacity of art. Last time, in Part 1, we heard from Keshet Dance and Center for the Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their founder and Artistic Director, Shira Greenberg, shared how Keshet is using dance to support the healing process for young people impacted by the justice system. Now, this installment will take us to our sister desert community of Las Vegas, Nevada to hear from another Meow Wolf Foundation grantee and their inspiring leader.

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Part 2: Oasis in the Desert: A conversation with Erica Vital-Lazare, Founder at Obodo Collective

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Nestled amongst the neighborhood in the Historic Westside is a little oasis of green. A place where all the residents are encouraged to get dirt between their fingers, enjoy fresh produce, and gather for knowledge sharing. This is Obodo Collective’s Urban Farm. Obodo is an Igbo (one of the largest and most industrious ethnic tribes in Eastern Nigeria) word for both “city” and “community". In Las Vegas, Obodo Collective certainly lives up to its definition. Through their vision to serve the community, Obodo offers programming and resources in housing justice, food security, and family support. Having assisted the people during the pandemic, they continue to grow both their offerings and reach throughout the city. 

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A small but mighty group of women make all the magic happen under Obodo. Serving as a founder, Erica Vital-Lazare, is a multi-talented artist and professor of Creative Writing and Marginalized Voices in Dystopian Literature at the College of Southern Nevada. She is co-producer of the photo-narrative installation Obsidian & Neon: Building Black Life and Identity in Las Vegas, and exhibited Seeing/Seen at the Barrick Museum as part of the Womxn of Color Arts Festival. She serves as editor of Of the Diaspora, a series revisiting classic Black works in literature with McSweeney’s Press. Her work has been featured in Catalyst, Sojourner, Thrice and Callaloo II. 

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Erica is tireless in her advocacy for the arts and her community and we’re fortunate to have a bit of her time to converse about Obodo.  

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Root us in place - tell us about your community. What would you like us to know? 

Obodo Collective concentrates much of its work in Las Vegas’ Historic Westside, an area once nationally recognized as a waystation for Black life and Black entertainers. Luminaries such as Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr., and Nat King Cole were celebrated in nightly performances on the Las Vegas Strip but were not welcome to lay their heads in the casino-hotels that profited from their performances. 

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In its heyday, the Westside was a thriving corridor of commerce and activism. After the ravages of felled Civil Rights leaders and movements, a raging drug war, and the plague of carceral actions and incursions, the Westside became a desert within our desert. One in four homes teeter on the poverty line, with those same numbers reporting prolonged periods of hunger, and a lack of access to fresh and nutritious foods. 

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In 2019, I drove with a good friend through the Westside on the heels of a conversation about community, preservation, and the creation of future-forward movements. Together we co-founded Obodo Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to creating community and combating generational poverty in the Historic Westside. 

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Share your organization’s mission and how you use art or the artistic practice to bring healing to your clients/community. 

We partner with our neighbors and sister-orgs in opening barriers to access – not only to healthy foods, but to affordable housing, childcare, and education. Our mission is to end generational poverty within Las Vegas’ Historic Westside. To fulfill our mission, we opened Obodo Urban Farm in 2023 on a half-acre plot just off the Jackson Street corridor. The farm has become a site of access and activation, celebrating the already existing abundance of this community. These grounds are home to butterflies and collard greens, ladybugs and melons, gardening classes and evening suppers, and health fairs. This past spring, we hosted and created Our Mothers’ Gardens Book Festival at Obodo Urban Farm. We have been able to work with our community, planting, and bringing harvest to a soil already enriched by the legacy of families and histories that are an integral, and often overlooked, part of Las Vegas, and a continuation of the migration and survival story of marginalized and indigenous peoples. 

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What have been the most important insights from the work of your organization? 

As Executive Director Tameka Henry, Master Gardener Cheyenne Kyle, and our board Claytee White and Dr. Tiffany Tyler bring their time and expertise to do this work, I have come to realize how all our tools are necessary to break ground. And the ground is already there. The community you serve is already at work.

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Please provide us a story about one person's life who was healed through your work. 

The Douglass family, facing the daunting challenges of houselessness and food insecurity, found a glimmer of hope through Obodo Collective. Our paths crossed when a referral was made to us from a community partner that was assisting a family living in their car. With the help of our dedicated team, they were able to secure temporary housing in a family shelter, providing stability and safety for their two young children. Additionally, they gained access to food by way of grocery gift cards which offered the family agency over their food needs and referrals to food pantries that offered nutritious meals. 

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Over time, with ongoing support and resources such as clothing for employment interviews and gas cards, Ms. Douglass found a stable job, and the family was able to transition into affordable housing. Today, the Douglass family is thriving, their daughter is excelling in school and Obodo is working with the family to secure affordable, quality childcare for their infant.

 

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Is art essential, and why?

Art reminds us that we live not only to serve but to create. Glass beads dating back to the Nilotic Egyptians, the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, decorative clay pots found on ancient sites all over the globe from China to Greece, Peru to Burkina Faso reflect our very human need to not only shape materials out of necessity but as a fulfillment of what is possible. 

We discover ourselves when we stand within reach of beauty. Whenever we gather together at Obodo Urban Farm within sight of our two grand murals, the colors radiate the intention of each artist to not only evoke beauty but to remind us of our own potential.  

We are reminded that we can carry on the work of Ms. Ruby Duncan, a welfare rights activist featured in all her resplendence in our central mural, and we’re invited to give honor to the teachings and continuing presence of our foremothers in the solemn gaze of the indigenous sister facing Ms. Ruby. Or we are encouraged to simply breathe and rest as we gaze upon a girlchild standing in a field of sunflowers within our garden mural, sponsored by Meow Wolf. Art in community spaces is an act of resistance, a reminder to carry on the work of expression, of resilience, of focus, of finding the peace and reclaiming the time it takes to restore beauty to the world – in spite of, and in defiance of – the noise that oppression hopes to impose upon us. 

As an artist and a caregiver, where and how do you seek solace? 

My solace comes from the support and company of members of my community. The act of listening with intention, fixing someone a plate, and having such acts of care returned when another community member fixes yours is one that our executive director so powerfully demonstrates. Learning to model such beautiful, life-bestowing acts of tenderness and care gives me solace. Spontaneously dancing on the garden grounds, reciting the lyrics to a Fantasia song while a chorus of community members lift their voices in celebration of just being together under the same ancient and continuing sun grants me a particular kind of drive to move forward, to work, and to rest, to strategize and to build. 

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In the spirit of our shared humanity and our collective healing as a global community, share a quote or a mantra that grounds or inspires you. 

My mantra comes through the philosophy and world-building of novelist-thinker Octavia Butler. It applies in all circumstances and places: “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”  

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Website for more information: https://www.obodocollective.org/

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