Pittsburgh Creative Corps Artist Directory

Celeta Hickman

A Black Bead Story: :The Digital Spectacles

Primary Discipline

Community engagement and social justice
Live performance, including puppetry, theater, dance, music, and spoken word poetry, etc.

Artistic Practice

Metals / Jewelry
Textile / fabric / weaving

About the Artist

Celeta HickmanCeleta Hickman is a dancer, masquerade, bead artist, and student of Africana Studies with an interest in the West African Art of leadership, functional art, and art societies. Celeta danced professionally with Nego Gato Capoeira Angola, Shades of Black Movement, and Legacy Arts Project, and is a nationally recognized Wolf Trap Program for Early Learning Through the Arts teaching artist. Ms. Hickman is the lead arts educator for the August Wilson Center for African American Culture. She is an accessories and masquerade designer with a popular stationery line called New Village Daughter Papers. Celeta has proudly served as the Afro-Caribbean dance instructor at the Hill Dance Academy for twelve years. In 2015 she was one of the local dancers selected to perform with Ronald K. Brown/ Evidence, A Dance Company in their critically acclaimed production “On Earth Together”.

Ms. Hickman worked at the Carnegie Museum of Art as a cataloger for the Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive. Her visual and public performance work has been featured at Pittsburgh Center for the Arts and Media, the Three Rivers Arts Festival First Night, Boom Concepts@the Carnegie Museum of Art, Montage, Penn State University, Contemporary Craft, Concept Galleries, and the North Shore. Celeta is the founder of the Ujamaa Collective in Pittsburgh, a wealth-building incubator for Africana women.

She is the artistic director of a series of short films featuring her ornate beadwork and accessories, choreography and historical analysis of Africana women’s leadership aesthetics and Black performance masquerades for her project, “A Black Bead Story: :The Digital Spectacles”. She is a masquerade artist who choreographs public performances, processionals, pageants, and wearable art shows honoring the natural world, historical epochs, and visions of the Afrofuture.

Photo by Celeta Hickman

Web

Accreditations, Certifications, and/or Awards

  • Jubilation Foundation Fellow, 2019-2020;
  • Style Week Pittsburgh – Artists of the Year, 2022-2023;
  • Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning through the Arts Master Teaching Artist, 2020

Provides Fabrication Services to Other Artists

Yes

Teaching Artist

Yes, early childhood

Joined the Directory

November 2022

Related

PROJECT

Pittsburgh Creative Corps

Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.

“My work is designed to bring joy and uplift humanity. My pieces of beadwork are for processionals, dance performances, and authentic and spontaneous community participation in the African worldview of audience and performers exchanging interactive roles.”

Celeta Hickman

Contact the Artist

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    Related

    PROJECT

    Pittsburgh Creative Corps

    Designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Pittsburgh Creative Corps initiative engages artists and creative workers to activate the public realm while providing economic opportunity.

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