Curation Saturday Dinner
7:00-8:30pm
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Chef Salimatu Amabebe {Bliss House}
with Jamila Woods

This week, we shine a spotlight on the unique pairing for Saturday’s Curation Dinner: Vegan delights from Chef Salimatu Amabebe of Bliss House with the refreshing poetry of Jamila Woods.

Salimatu Amabebe is a visual artist and vegan chef based in Portland, Oregon. Amabebe runs the food and event company, Bliss House, hosts weekly Vegan Nigerian Pop-Up Dinners, and is the creator of Black Feast – a monthly vegan pop-up that celebrates black artists and writers through food. Amabebe is also the co-founder and artistic director of Kirí Collective – an artist collective that holds events and exhibitions centering people of color and their work. Amabebe’s work focuses on the intersection of food and art, drawing from family memories, recipes, and the exploration of the body as a means of both artistic expression and consumption.

Follow along with Salimatu on Instagram @salimatuamabebe and Facebook @blissshouse

Jamila Woods’ cultural lineage–from her love of Lucille Clifton’s poetry to cherished letters from her grandmother to the infectious late 80s post-punk of The Cure–structure the progressive, delicate and minimalist soul of HEAVN, her debut solo album released in the summer of 2016 on Closed Sessions. “It’s like a collage process,” she says. “It’s very enjoyable to me to take something I love and mold it into something new.” A frequent guest vocalist in the hip-hop, jazz and soul world, Jamila has emerged as a once-in-a-generation voice on her soul-stirring debut.

Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, Woods grew up in a family of music lovers. It took a surprise poetry class with a high school arts program for Jamila to finally find her metaphorical and literal voice. “Through poetry, I realized you are the expert of your own experience,” she says. Her poetry studies continued in college and in her professional career with Young Chicago Authors.

Music–like poetry– is personal. “It became a way to stop hiding, to actually be the most honest with myself through writing,” she says. “It helps me check in with myself.” And that honesty translated to HEAVN, an album she describes as a collection of, “nontraditional love songs pushing the idea of what makes a love song.” You’ll find the bits and pieces of her past and present that make Jamila: family, the city of Chicago, self-care, and the black women she calls friends.

Jamila is an artist of substance creating music crafted with a sturdy foundation of her passions and influences. True and pure in its construction and execution, her music is the best representation of Jamila herself: strong in her roots, confident in her ideas, and attuned to the people, places and things shaping her world.

Jamila Woods is on Facebook @jamilawoodsofficial and on Instagram @jamilawoods