Building a Community of Creators with BlkArthouse and Von Deon

Key Takeaways

hey there over the past several weeks i've had the pleasure of collaborating with tatiana rice and von dion to create a special t-shirt for the roboflow community today we're going to unveil the design of the t-shirt and chat with them both about things like inspiration the process of creating something new what it takes to build a community and finally what they're excited about in the future so stay tuned [Music] today i am joined by two special guests we have tatiana rice founder of black art house welcome tatiana hello and then we also have von dion artist and founder of thanks canvas hey dion hi hey um so i thought i'd start off by just giving you your guys's opinion on pie torch or tensorflow do you have any definitely tensorflow right i mean that's probably what most people want to hear on this channel but [Laughter] high torque or tensorflow yeah there's been a quite the debate going on um but yeah so today we're not going to talk about computer vision stuff in directly but well a little bit indirectly but we're going to chat about today is a project that the three of us have been working on for roboflow and it's a special edition t-shirt that we're printing um to give away to members of our community and the design is by fontion so that's who's who's joining us today which is great and um and so if you're interested in seeing the design and finding out how you can get uh one of the shirts yourself you'll just have to stay tuned until the end until we unveil it unveil the design um but yeah before we we do that i just wanted to have a conversation with you both about being in the creative space being creators or builders and um and talking a little bit about how community plays a role in that um so with roboflow one of our main missions is we want to empower people to use computer vision to take this idea and make it a reality and we we found that some of the best ways to do that is to encourage people to take these ideas and start small and just see where they end up and and then share it with other people so that you can inspire others to to build and create as well and so that's kind of the angle that that we've been taking and we really want to highlight other creators um not just in the computer vision space but in other communities as well and um so i guess i'll start with you tatiana uh what what like could you tell us a little bit about black art house and kind of what inspired you to get started yeah definitely so you raised a good point in talking about community and black art house is what i would call a mission-driven organization centered on empowering black artists and providing economic opportunity for black artists specifically and this all came to me um being a black woman myself wanting art in my own home that you know not only reflected me and my culture but also uh i was able to support somebody that looked like me and so i tried to find something like this online as somebody who doesn't know a whole lot about art or had a previous like art background but i wanted to start collecting and did not see any kind of platform for this there just wasn't a community built around black artists which kind of shocked me so of course everything with the black lives matter movement started occurring and george floyd was murdered in may and a lot of people were asking me for my input on you know what are black artists that i can support more people are getting more invested in black communities and wanting to support black lives so i basically talked to a lot of different black artists black galleries black curators trying to figure out what does this look like and is this a pain point or need in the community that people want and it seemed like it was so uh put pencil to paper was able to talk to some amazing black artists including dion here about getting involved with the organization and really creating an organization around black artists largely so one of the things that we're able to do in addition to having you know an online marketplace to feature black artists is also providing these economic opportunities like we have right now with roboflow to connect black artists with uh companies like yours that are able to really bring his art to the forefront yeah and so so you guys totally got connected through through this idea right like would you have run into each other otherwise no so yeah and dion's you're over in l.a yeah i'm in la yeah yeah but i think that's what's so amazing about this is just how people from across the country or in other countries even um are getting connected now through basically because we have to with zoom and all these other things yeah it's awesome so our right now we would just work with six artists um but they're everywhere you know as you mentioned we have one in brazil we have dion in la we have one in texas like it's all across the board um so yeah dion uh do you want to explain a little bit about like thanks canvas and some of your work and and kind of how you got started into into building your own thing yeah well um i you know i really i got started with thanks canvas because i you know i've tried so hard to get into a gallery like i was always taught you know going to art school i was always taught that if you wanted recognition that you needed to have your work in a gallery you needed some form of representation and representing yourself at the time wasn't a popular thing to do it was almost like insane it's like how are you gonna how are you gonna do this um and i tried and tried and you know i just figured i would start my own gallery because i figured i could and you know both of my parents are entrepreneurs and they kind of instilled that in me they told me like you know if you want sometimes you have to do things yourself you know and they encouraged me to ask for help they encouraged me to reach out and use my network and things but you know once that is exhausted you got to do it yourself so i kind of took that approach and um so that's how it got started but really what i wanted to do was i wanted to help other artists um really feel can like to have control over their work because i did try to get into galleries a lot and i did make it into a few galleries and the experience there was okay i sold some work but you know the galleries took 40 percent of my profit right and i had to mark my paintings way up so some of them sold and some of them would never sell because they were just way too expensive so um that's what things canvas is doing it's it's uh allowing artists to have control of their margins and have a way lower overhead um and and take from whatever they sell so um and i just want to allow artists to have a platform to sell their work and show their work and get into the groove of showing their work selling the work and getting a little bit of confidence so it's really um a starters platform for artists that are wanting to sell art and it's the starters platform for millennials and young collectors you know because it takes a while to be able to start collecting large pieces and you know uh high-priced pieces so everyone wants to own art and that's that's really my goal is to allow everybody to um have art because i think it's important i think it changes the way that your space looks it brightens your day it helps you it's a service to to you every day so um so that's thanks canvas and uh i'm i'm just excited about it every day i'm happy to be uh growing it and inviting people in and uh and showing and showcasing my work as well yeah i think you're seeing that in a lot of other spaces too with like music right like the record labels like people are like oh i don't need a record label anymore like i can just go and publish my music on bandcamp or youtube or whatever yeah and more the profits go to you you get to pick how you want to be like presented uh and marketed you know and and i think that it's just like it's great for a consumer of art too right because i just have so many more options available to me and it's more accessible without having other people pick what i should be listening to or should be should have on my walls um i'm also seeing that a lot with art too it's just people are talking about different price points more which is really great because yeah it's it's kind of intimidating to go a gallery and see like a thousand dollar painting right you're just like i'll never i'll never be able to do that yeah yeah and the whole experience is interesting because you know uh for the artists artists don't know how to really sell art and consumers don't really know how to consume art they don't necessarily know what to do when they're going to purchase their first painting or whatever it may be sculpture and they have to learn that it's you know there's no particular lingo for it you know maybe if you're maybe if you're at a you know sotheby's auction house but um but when you're buying from uh you know a local artist there's no lingo there's no there's no rules there's no rules to it you know it's just you exchanging um money for art and you're exchanging for that value that art gives you um and that's that's really that's really important to know and i want to help educate people on how to consume art i want to help educate artists on how to sell art so that they don't feel a huge pressure and that they don't feel that they need to maybe mark their paintings way way up because the artist next to them is you know selling art for you know ten thousand dollars or whatever you know and um and also just kind of teaching uh artists that there's a process to it like any other business uh the art business you have to scale it up you know you have to start small and if you're selling prints or drawings for five bucks then that's what you're doing until you are able to work your way up but you know you're not gonna come out the gate selling paintings for a thousand bucks you know it just you know it doesn't work like that anywhere so yeah um but you know i think it's i think it's uh what stuck out to me is that you talked about price point and that kind of uh leads me into my work like i am focusing on uh recovery because i i'm an artist in recovery and i like to focus on you know black people and black culture because that's who i am so uh it's really most of my work is about growth and you know it's got these flower faces and they're kind of um their faces are growing right but at the same time their identity is not necessarily you can't you can't tell who they are because their faces their face is a bouquet of flowers but you can tell that they are you know black people because their hairstyles you know the beards the hairstyles the kinds of clothing and so that's kind of how i like to focus on that because i'm kind of telling my story and describing myself about my growth and how you know as a you know if you are a flower if you want to be you know represented as a flower you know you flowers have cycles you know and sometimes they are um sometimes they don't come back and sometimes they come back every year you know it depends on how you are sowing your seeds and how you are moving pursuing your growth so um so that's what i really like to focus on and um i don't know i think connecting with black art house has allowed me to kind of dive a little deeper into that and dive a little deeper into uh what the next step is for me yeah and amanda you raise a good point in how like the internet and technology and of course roboflow knows this just as well as anybody does that these are really democratizing forces like they are allowing people who might not otherwise have access to a gallery kind of like dion talked about or even from the collector's side you know i i didn't know to go into a gallery and how to talk to collectors and how to talk to you know it's an exclusive world and the tech world doesn't like that the tech world likes meritocracy which is how uh everything really should happen and occur so that is uh it's totally our purpose here and what we're trying to do increasing awareness and reach and really having a broader audience being exposed to talented artists like dion here well and i think the education piece that you're talking about is really key too right like if you're introducing something new to the world or to a new audience like you that education can like really hook them in for in and create a long-term fan or in our case maybe a customer or an advocate um and that's the approach that we've been taking as well is like uh we're dealing with new technologies that are kind of intimidating um but once you start educating people they they start to be like oh what was i so worried about like like this is actually easier than i expected or you know it's just that first step is always so intimidating and then after you do it you're just like oh yeah i'm i'm a pro now uh what's something that really intimidated you guys before starting um your projects that looking back on you're just like oh well that was easy like why was i so worried about that oh my goodness uh everything you hit the nail on the head um starting anything feels so scary because you don't feel like you're ever an expert in the area that you're pursuing uh like i talked about i did not have a background in art i was not an artist myself all i knew was that there was this problem and i think that there should have been a solution for it um but the more that does so many things right yeah right that works in so many instances yeah um and but like when i started talking to artists and the more that you just talk to people talk to people talk to people the more that you're like oh no i this is just a problem and a solution you know it doesn't need to be this exclusive and intimidating process that you know maybe a couple people who are in the upper class or in a different socioeconomic status want to impose and say you can't do this it definitely is something that anybody can do and anybody can pursue you know when you are starting a project you're always on the outside looking in even if it's your idea you haven't unfolded it yet so um you know biggest boundary for me was just understanding that like i needed to i needed to start to understand what i where i wanted to go so when i'm looking at other before i started really painting and when i made the decision to start painting and really pursuing making art for a career i looked at other artists and i started to look at what their what their themes were and who they were and what their voices were and from the outside looking in it almost seems like these people are just choosing these things because these things are pretty and popular but the things that they're choosing are actually not they come natural to them and it's the things that are it's who they are in their work so for a long time i struggle i just made so many random paintings because i'm trying to create something that i think is popular and something that other people like and kind of mimicking other artists and i'm not realizing that i just have to be me so the more reps i put in um the more the art became me and the more natural it became to me and i wasn't so scared about like a painting being imperfect or not coming out the way it looked in my head it's more of like this is just who i am and i'm just going to continue to replicate who i am and that was a huge boundary because as an artist like you don't uh you know it's a very small amount of people who know who they are when they first start to create art and uh it kind of just it reveals itself it revealed itself to me so that was a huge boundary for me and still it's still i'm still you know peeling back the layers and um it's like tatiana said it's intimidating it's really intimidating to be um to want to move into something that is especially the art business it's growing up it's like you know it's not a it's not the practical track you know it's not the track that you know it's not like being a doctor or a lawyer you know it's kind of like a crapshoot in people's minds it's really just a business but the way it has always been presented and explained is like are you sure you're gonna be able to do that is that sustainable kind of thing um so that boundaries would be a huge one to get over yeah i think i think that conversation needs to change with with children especially because i remember i wanted to be like a cartoonist like i loved cartoons i love to doodle those and like i remember one of my classmates who was my age was still just like oh that's not gonna help the world and then looking at it you're like what like calvin and hobbes and garfield you know like there's so many like like warner brothers like all these you know like intermediates just got rebooted like i mean all these things like bring so much delight to people and and myself included and i was just like you can change the world like that is such a like sad way of looking at things so yeah especially with black artists i mean we did a webinar not too long ago and one of our artists her name is diane and she's a little bit older and she started doing comic book characters when she was younger because there just wasn't any comic book characters that looked like her um and that was important to her and so she was able to share that and see somebody that represented her as this powerful character and it representation is just so important oh for sure yeah um so i think are we ready to unveil the design i have it here let's do it yeah and then dion we'll have you kind of just talk through how you landed with this uh design so okay here it is yeah raccoon yes lenny so i love this i really love this project and i loved being able to create this and i think i you know i racked my brain for hours and hours before i was able to come up with the right idea and you know i looked around on the world before website and i'm reading everything and i'm like i see what's going on here but like i'm not sure how to depict that but amanda you really helped me a lot by kind of telling me your opinion and um and i've i've you know i've always been a fan of the flowers so i'm just you know i think it's the flower face is my thing because i'm just there's growth in everything i'm obsessed with growth i'm obsessed with you know you know physical spiritual growth but also like company growth you know it could be it's just a universal symbol right um but this design is really uh based around the computer vision it kind of looks like like pixels or how a computer would see right and it's also in this this little square which i i don't know i grew up uh i went to photography school and that's kind of how i learned to see you know i learned to see through a little rectangle and i was taught that if it's in the frame um people are going to assume that it's purposely there so that's kind of how i always picture things i always am looking at things through a rectangle um on a canvas or through a camera lens i'm kind of picturing it that way but it just just so happened that computer vision kind of works this way right it has these kind of uh facial recognition squares so that's that's really what's going on here it's it's the roboflow mascot lenny inside of the square it's kind of representing the computer vision and the scribblies are just a representation of how a computer would see and it's just a fun design it's like uh you know he's giving up two peace signs it's just fun it's just a fun uh little raccoon you know i i don't know i love it where did you get the peace side thing that was one thing that i was always curious about like did that just was that just like all right this is how i'm drawing this guy i don't i don't know i think it's uh because you know you told me that you wanted uh like a rock band t-shirt oh yeah so i think i think like i was kind of going for like a you know like a rock thing but i i didn't want to i didn't want to go there but um but i don't know i think it's cool i think it's just like it's kind of like i don't know i i picture if you were to see his whole body i picture him doing like the touchdown dance where he's like you know i don't know it's but it's just a it's a fun design and it's it's cool it's universal and i think it's it's just cool yeah i think this is like exactly what we were looking for and dion you touched on it a little bit is i was like okay we want a raccoon like our company has this unofficial official mascot lenny with the raccoon um and then mixing like the the flowers from your work like that was what really stood out to me i loved all the pieces where you you had taken this uh you know somewhat clear object or person made them slightly abstract and then filled in with the flowers and i just loved how like smooth that was to transition into the flowers um and then yeah the scribbles are great because it makes it feel very organic it doesn't feel super clean which with technology like a lot of times we want things to feel like you know clean and and um like edgy and stuff like that and i think what's great is this just feels very analog like you know you can tell it's like hand drawn um and just uh it still works with um like you said the bounding boxes for computer vision and then this idea that we have a lot of people trying to solve problems for detecting raccoons in their backyard i think all these things really came together and i'm just so happy with the end result yeah yeah i love it i think it's um i don't know i had a lot of fun with it and um i'm always i've always been drawn to that organic style when i first started painting i used to make these really clean paintings and i i wanted to make them look digital because that was just fascinating to me but as i started to create more and more i just i'm drawn to that because it feels very human and i think that's kind of that's kind of like the tie-in right it's like you um you have a computer doing something that is trying to replicate you're trying to replicate a human activity and uh it's most of the time it never feels quite right right yeah it's not it's not right but it's but you know what's going on so it's cool it's it's cool i can't really explain it but um so yeah so what we're gonna do with these t-shirts is uh we're gonna randomly pick 10 people who share this video or the blog post that will be dropping this video into we're gonna give away ten of these t-shirts um to just random people and then the other thing that we're gonna do is if we if anyone's out there who's working on a computer vision problem um and they wanna share their work on our blog we'll be giving these t-shirts out to those as well so if you've been on the fence as diana tatiana had said it's a little scary but it's good to share your work because you'll you you'll usually be pretty happy that you did you'll get good feedback and it encourages you to you know keep building more um but yeah and you'll get one of these sweet t-shirts too if you get featured on our blog um so yeah if you are interested in that you can reach out to us at hello roboflow.ai and um and we'll we'll start asking you some questions and hopefully get your work up on on our blog um so the last thing i want to chat with you guys about is the the future um with computer vision and roboflow we talk about the future a lot and like what this technology can do and we're always kind of looking ahead um trying to predict things that are almost unpredictable but um for you both of you what what's coming up next what are what are you looking forward to i want to expand uh thanks canvas i want to um just get as many artists as i can on the platform uh in a comfortable way and you know i'm not i just want them to have a place to be and i want them to have a starter i really want to wrap it up in 2021 so that they have a website that they can link um in their bio they have somewhere that they can work out of until they get their own website until they feel comfortable enough to you know move on and do their own thing because that's what that's what i really wanted to be and um and for me personally i'm gonna be telling more stories and digging deeper into my experience um with my art more personal art i'm still going to be doing some flower face things but i'm going to be really telling the story of my upbringing and uh and kind of who i am i think this whole situation this whole 2020 has kind of pushed me into really recognizing who i am and it sounds so crazy i'm i'm 20 i'm gonna be 29 on december 18th and like i'm seriously really just recognizing like oh my gosh this is like i'm really becoming who i am and i'm understanding um that maybe i was behaving a little differently out of what other people told me so that's what's next it's gonna be epic i'm excited to start working on these things and showing everybody what i'm doing and so where where can we find everything thanks canvas.com you can find it on thanks canvas.com i'm gonna be uh i'm gonna be dropping some uh some paintings on there and um you're going to be seeing a lot new a lot more new artists and uh also the thanks canvas instagram page follow things canvas on instagram um there's going to be featured artists um every wednesday and there's going to be new artwork every monday starting 2021 so yeah that is so exciting yeah what about you tatiana yeah and so for black art house uh we have probably two main things that we're looking forward to uh with the intentional goal of having black art house be the sole or not the sole place but like a central place to find art inspired by black culture and uh being able to provide continue to providing these economic opportunities for you know black artists um so we have our exhibition coming up our very first one that is going to be virtual featuring original artwork by six of our black artists including dion so that's going to be really exciting i've been getting some of the artwork in and it's really cool to see all of them together and all on the walls really fun so that launches this friday i don't know when this is going to be posted but uh this friday is november 27th so if the day after thanksgiving black friday yeah exactly right yeah it is um so that'll be going until december 18th we actually have already had a piece sold pre-market so people are really excited for this um including this artwork that is right there um yeah and so the second part of what we're doing right now is we are crowdfunding because we want for 2021 to be able to become more of an open access platform for more black artists to be able to submit their work and for a broader audience to be able to see some of the really great artwork by black artists all around the country and all around the world so working on that working with a couple technical volunteers since i am not technical but uh appreciate the work that they can do in putting that together so that's what's coming up for black art house you can find us at blackouthouse.com spelled blkarthouse.com or follow us on twitter and instagram at blackguardhouse so uh appreciate being here amanda yeah i am yeah 2021 sounds so great for you guys and i'm so excited and uh yeah i i think i think seeing the heart that you put into everything it'll just continue to grow and um i'm excited to watch everything scale hey thanks for joining us if you enjoyed this conversation please consider liking the video or subscribing to our channel and if you'd like to learn more about roboflow visit roboflow.com