Moving through the world, carrying along with me the shroud of Blackness, was always a curious blessing. It brought along with it the most dynamic insight, and the most iridescent beauty, but also the most complicated frustrations, and the most devastating voids. Being both full, and also compromised; gifted, and also denied; bionic, and also incapacitated. The challenge, then, became: how does one pay homage to the daring of our past, but also to the hopefulness of our future? That answer materialized in the form of my art. Even in its (often) dark majesty, and mysterious candor, there was something more that I wanted to share. 

 

I wanted Blackness to be this wonderful, tangible, beautiful, sacred thing that you could pick up, and hold dear, and share, and share again, and pass down. I needed to create a varied catalogue of objects and trinkets that could, at the very touch, transport us to our most visceral place within Blackness—a honing device to the spaces, and the feelings, and the miracles that had been displaced, or stolen, or forgotten. 

                  

As a child of the Disapora, I had always felt homesick for a place that was no more. I traveled the world looking for the things that harkened the true luxury and sophistication of Blackness. This line of carefully-curated mementos, and lifestyle items, are my tribute to our experience. These pieces hail from the cotton-fields of Mississippi, to the finest crystal of Austria, to the ancestral splendor of Cape Hope in South Africa, to the Great Wall of China. In holding them dear, and sharing them with our families, we create, in turn, our own new legacies and traditions. We become the figures in our lives that remind one another that Black has always been, and will always be, at the very pinnacle of human expression. 

 

Afro-Opulence is a journey that we share, over and over again. We stake our claim to the luxuries in life what we so seriously deserve. We make our quiet commitment to being surrounded by beauty. We bring opulence (back) into our day-to-day chronicles in this thing we call life. 

 

I am so enormously grateful for your support, and I look forward to bringing more of the very best that this world has to offer. To you. To your homes. To your families. To your lives. 

 

Gratefully & Reflectively Yours,

​

Raub Welch