THE CREATOR

Giani Jones is an Afro-Indigenous independent contractor and emerging artist from The Lucayan Archipelago//The Bahamas and New Orleans East. Giani is an alum of New York University (NYU) with a BFA and a concentration in 4-dimensional art. It was there that G began to identify as a conceptual artist–refining her interests in the ideas of deracination, palimpsests, and liminal spaces—the core concepts that propel her mixed media-based practice. She has exhibited with Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Contemporary Art Center NOLA, All Street Gallery NYC and in 2023 G had her first solo show at AXIOM Gallery in New Orleans: A Visit, to A Visit From—The Studios. As an artist, assistant curator, and installer, Giani has worked on pop-up exhibitions  for Curations by the Green Tea Collective including Beyond the Waters and FREEMAN REVIVAL. With her brand N E W   N E G R O E S, Giani creates and designs streetwear with the purpose of fortifying blaxploitation culture against Eurocentric erasure to demonstrate that blackness is beyond a monolith. Giani’s work intends to build a holistic aesthetic across the creative process and the everyday experience of expression. 

Giani’s art movement: ESOTERIC SURREALIST POP

//Giani’s ethos: BLEED PRODUCT & PROCESS

zelle GianiMarisaJones | venmo @Giani-Jones-1 | cash app $GianiMarisaJones

THE CLOTHES

A celebration of Afro-American culture

New Negroes embraces language, signs and signification as the most critical tools in the functionality of a people. They are the weapons that write redacted and untrue histories, the tools that allow us to interpret as we conceptualize—between their many forms, they are friend and foe.

Negro is about unbreakable pride, it is pro-Black and anti status, it is a celebration of Black history and culture. It’s like. I'm lit, my people lit, been lit, stay lit; they can't subvert our identity or ideas. In America or elsewhere. Dig and not by proxy.

Each piece is hand printed or created by Giani Jones, founder and owner of New Negroes clothing and design. 

WHY NEW NEGROES

Popularized by Alain LeRoy Locke during the Harlem Renaissance, the term New Negro implies a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation.

"Negro" was a first step, in terms of vernacular nomenclature, in describing people of African descent in the United States with civility. Creating the trajectory toward labels such as colored, Black, and African-American, "Negro" reflects a progression in our respective liberties and the acknowledgment of the existence of our consciousness beyond being someone's nigger. Using "New" as the adjective, I want to call to mind that developing consciousness—that feeling that we are on the path toward equality, inclusion, and obtaining those rights to which our diaspora has always been entitled.

The struggle is intersectional and perpetual. New Negroes is a way to remember and commemorate our first steps and be inspired to continue, even when our people are being killed and disproportionally imprisoned. Though progress is moving slowly, almost cyclically, New Negroes is a reminder to keep that first sense of hope within the everyday life of blackness toward structural reform. 2999 is a far off date for Negro America, but Blackness endures.