Obianozo Chukwuma
Urban Beauty: Equity Entrepreneurship and Black Womanhood
The goal of Urban Beauty is to increase the visibility of black female entrepreneurialism and showcase black women’s role as major contributors to American enterprise by articulating the historical and present-day discourse surrounding their exclusion to flip the paradigm and develop new concepts for ecosystem existence. Urban beauty takes the form of a written anthropological deep dive that explores the evolution of black female entrepreneurialism from the Antebellum period to present day and culminates in a visual atlas titled “Seeing Black: The Unseen Narratives of the Black Hair Care Industry.” “Seeing Black” was purposefully designed to be perfectly in-cohesive and unapologetically bold, to contrast the almost clinical diagnostics of generic business nomenclature. With each map comes a unique representation of the once-invisible voices of black female entrepreneurialism, a glimpse at the everyday inside a hidden ecology. Lastly, this project was used to inform a larger venture: MMARA. MMARA is an e-commerce platform that connects black women to a curated selection of hair products specific to their unique hair profiles, each created by black/POC-owned companies or firms focusing on for-black hair products. Through this platform, black entrepreneurs in the beauty industry finally have a platform to grow and gain economic stability.
