The exhibition features works from the Council of Black Male Success Rites of Passage, a program of the Cultural Wellness Center. Your experience in this gallery results from a collaboration between Mia and the Cultural Wellness Center. The perspective labels were authored by Cultural Wellness Center faculty: Seba Ahmad Azzahir, Elder Atum Azzahir, Brother Minkara Tezet, the Council for Black Male Success.

Brother Minkara Tezet writes: “At the Cultural Wellness Center, we stress the capacity of Africans to produce knowledge, to have authority over knowledge, and to place significant pressure on dominant societies, institutions, and communities to accurately credit the source and impact of this knowledge. To our Ancestors, the Metu Neturu is a unique form of symbolic writing and thinking. Symbolic thinking reflects and illustrates the dynamic process of divine thought. Each sign is a symbol that reveals its true meaning only to initiated readers by means of a divinely inspired process. After 500 years, the African is returning to our original ways of knowing and being in creation.”