A new, sustainably built Black Schoolhouse at 1660 N. Roman St. will formally celebrate its grand opening on Oct. 10 in the 7th Ward, the neighborhood whose history inspired the venture.
The Black Schoolhouse will offer art education and community-building as part of The Black School, an organization co-founded by Joseph Cuillier and Shani Peters in 2016. After operating The Black School out of Xavier University for the past five years, the project now has a physical home in a new community art center that offers a graphic design apprenticeship program for young people, with the goal of teaching them to use graphic design for social change and organizing.
From its start, the School has revolved around its graphic design apprenticeship program, a six-month training program that teaches graphic design to young people ages 14 to 24. The Black School’s design studio often employs program alumni to work on projects with its clients.
“We go far beyond making paintings and sculptures,” Peters said. “How do we use our imaginations to create solutions that we need for real world problems?”
The building’s location, on North Roman Street near its intersection with St. Bernard Avenue, was intentional, Peters and Cuillier said.
Cuillier has deep roots in the 7th Ward: after a group of brothers including his great grandfather moved here from the St. Rose area in St. Charles Parish, they built each other’s homes one by one, starting off on Pauger Street.
His ancestors were part of a community of carpenters, iron workers, blacksmiths, masons and roofers who built the neighborhood together. The 7th Ward was also known as a hotbed of political activism, during the modern Civil Rights era and during late the 19th century, as the home of the famous activist group Comité de Citoyens.
Cuillier said he was inspired by his “personal history, but also the larger history and the role of this neighborhood as a site of Black liberation, a site of building.”
Next month’s grand opening will celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Black School as a project. The 2,000-square-foot schoolhouse will feature youth programming throughout the week and multigenerational events, called “Black Love Saturdays,” every other weekend.
Built from old shipping containers and fitted with solar panels and batteries that will store excess power, the Black Schoolhouse will include classroom spaces for “wet” art and digital art; a gallery and community gathering space; a combination library and meditation room; and a kitchen. Peters and Cuillier are also working on a fruit tree orchard outside — heeding a request they heard from the community during the design process, they said.
A former Black School apprentice returns to mentor students
To date, 39 young people have completed the school’s apprenticeship program.
Since completing the apprenticeship program in 2023, D’aliyah Jackson has created branding and merchandise for the 25th anniversary of the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Art in New York and developed promotional materials for the grand opening of the Black Schoolhouse. Now, she is pursuing a degree in visual communications and graphic design.
Jackson, now 23, was part of the apprenticeship program when it was still operating out of Xavier University’s art village — a “cozy” space with a couple of tables and a handful of desktop computers.
Now she looks forward to working out of the new space, as a mentor to the junior design team.
“I look at it as an extension of where we started,” she said. “We’ll have an actual library in the space, bigger classrooms, an actual gallery space, and a lot of other things that we didn’t have in the studio.”
One of the main goals of the new Schoolhouse is to build community in the 7th Ward and create more opportunities for civic engagement in the neighborhood, Peters said.
In keeping with the 7th Ward’s history of making social change, The Schoolhouse work will foster the Peoples Movement Assembly model, where community members identify and address the systemic, root causes of their problems.
Think of proactive “solution-making” that starts with 7th Ward residents, Peters said.
“It’s not going to be us saying, ‘All right, we’re going to organize a plan to fix the potholes,’” she said. “The community will agree on the number one thing they want to respond to at any given time, and we’ll organize together to respond to that through creative engagements and programs.”
