Dear Friend,
On Saturday, September 25, Kea’s Ark received the Mid-Atlantic Emmy for Arts Program (Long Form). The half-hour documentary premiered in February 2021 as a special State of the Arts. It was a journey that began with a 2016 State of the Arts story about an exhibition of Kea’s work. Kea’s Ark is a truly New Jersey story, the kind that we here at State of the Arts feel privileged to tell.
Kea Tawana, who died in 2015, left behind a complicated legacy. A self-taught artist and builder, no one was quite certain where she had grown up, or even the exact year she was born. What was clear was that Kea was a visionary. She saw the troubled state of the Central Ward, the poverty-stricken neighborhood in Newark where she had made a home since the 1960s, and her mind turned to finding solutions—for herself and, increasingly, for others. Odd-jobs as a demolitionist led her to think of a use for the sturdy materials she was salvaging from the decaying 19th century houses being torn down all around her. She designed and built a 3-story ark on an abandoned lot in the Central Ward, a point she had determined was the highest spot in Newark. At first, Kea planned to escape the city on her ark—later, she envisioned it as a community center, and a way to teach young people the craft of building.
