Yaya Atta is a bi-coastal, Harlem, NY (Lenape Territory) and Oakland, CA (Ohlone Territory) based artist and the hood resource builder behind Cookie’s Joint, a community-ran project that provides food, clothing, toiletries, gender-affirming items, emergency-housing, crisis support, and drug/alcohol recovery support to LGBTQI people of color. They make extravagant memes challenging social norms, brutal poetry dissecting histories of abuse and violence, multimedia performance excursions through the life of the intersectionally oppressed, and nuanced prose and essay contemplating current events through tiny cracks and details that have been overlooked in our struggle to create easier, more binary narratives. They want to make even more than that, to bring esoteric beauty and ideas to a public stage, to enable space travel from the comfort of your sofa, and to terraform your insides and live there. There will be books, there will be video, there will be interactive exhibitions you can choose to engage in, and there will be dozens of odd little things that they have wanted to give you for a long time but have no idea how to explain. They also enjoy the idea of a place where all of their creativity can reside. They’ve appreciated illuminating seemingly disjointed shards of numerous lives and experiences before crowds whose awareness brought them to this piece or that. They believe that bringing all these disparate crowds together to see and react to their full body of work, at intersections they may have never perceived or thought of is a form of art in itself. And finally, as someone who grew up knowing first hand what it meant to go hungry, being a starving artist is deeply unappealing to them.
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