The Museum of Black Joy is a striking name for a photography collection and a brief encounter with the online museum will reveal not only the thought behind its nomenclature but also the positive affirmations of the Black experience that underly the creation of the ‘borderless exhibition’.

In the first days of January 2020, before the coronavirus came ravaging and metamorphosed into a full-blown pandemic, Philadelphia-based poet turned photographer Andrea Walls started a photograph a day mission that reflects Black people in ordinary moments of grace and kindness and non-traumatic breath.

With inspirational slogans such as “I see you. You are beautiful” and “Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed” prominent on the online space that features crystal-clear images of Black people in dramatic frames: A serious girl looking for books in a library, a beaming senior citizen pumping her first in a Black Power salute, a couple chatting over milkshakes at an outside dinette; it is clear to any guest that the photographs curated in this online collection are in the business of highlighting joy in a most traumatic and rancorous period in time.

Elaborating on the genesis of the sizeable collection that makes up the Museum of Black Joy, Walls recalls that the news headlines and social media were strewn with stories of strife and animosity with many of the stories being about violence directed against minorities and people of color, so to dilute the overwhelming negativity, she resolved to post images of Black people reflective of her own experience, every day.

"It was really starting to impact my emotional self, and became so psychically overwhelming," she stated. "So I just saw the power of shifting the lens, making a conscious decision to pay attention to the joy."

"And I felt, all right, well, this is what I can do," she recalls. "I can show daily images of what I'm calling Black joy, which is just ordinary moments of grace and kindness and non-traumatic breath. I started it as a daily practice." She paused. "I got 96 days before the pandemic closed everything down."

In the darkest days of the pandemic and during last summer's Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and racism, Walls says The Museum of Black Joy became a source of healing. "My day is organized around thinking about how can I make more visual joy available," she says.

With funding from the Leeway Foundation and a grant from a haircare company supporting Black women-identified artists, Walls is looking to expand her virtual museum of Black photography to realize her vision of it as an inheritor of the Black Arts Movement. On her website, Walls credits inspirations and collaborators ranging from Kleaver Cruz's The Black Joy Project to Bettina Love, the professor and author of We Want to Do More Than Survive.

A Pushcart Prize-nominated poet before taking up photography after participating in the Women's Mobile Museum project in 2018, where she worked with the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center and South African photojournalist Zanele Muholi, Walls is astounded with the resonances between writing and visual art.

"As a poet, I always pay attention to a small detail or a fleeting feeling," she says. "Of joy or despair or whatever it is, just, the way your life and imagination crescendos, depending on the mood, the time of day, the light, the music in the background, your heartbreak, and how all of those things are layered upon one another."

As much as the Museum of Black Joy has served as a virtual neighborhood of sorts, Walls says she's currently seeking non-traditional physical spaces to exhibit the work in real life. Helping to flood the cultural conversation with Black joy, she says, is an artists' approach to reverse engineer anti-Black racism.

Right now, the museum features only Walls' own photography but she hopes to change that soon. Recently, Walls has been poring through local archives to search for more images of Black joy. "And try to extract stories of joy from what can be kind of hostile places," she says. "The way they've arranged the history of black people in America — it hasn't centered joy. But we've always lived it."