Photo: Refine Collective's 2024 Juneteenth Black-owned business market
In honor of National Black Business Month, we’re taking a look at three local Black-owned businesses that we admire for different reasons. Their goals and their contributions to Chicago and beyond speak to our own priorities of creativity, innovation and community.
As these are just a taste of the rich fabric of Chicago’s Black Business ecosystem, we encourage you to familiarize yourself with more of these companies and organizations this month. Doing so will set the stage for you to connect with any number of new and new-to-you businesses (this month or any month), and we can all benefit from getting to know the unique perspectives Chicago’s business landscape has to offer.
See our highlights below, then peruse more at handy lists compiled by Time Out, Refine Collective, and others.
Black Ensemble Theatre
We’ve noted how special Black Ensemble Theater is previously in Creative Juice, and we want to bring extra attention to this renowned Chicago institution. With their mission to eradicate racism and its effects through theatre, they have made a name for themselves by producing highly engaging musical plays acted, sung and staged by impeccable talents. With their theatre work celebrated by and uniting an already diverse audience, they have an even grander vision yet: expanding into a full Ravenswood campus consisting of public use, retail, educational and artist-residence space, collectively serving as a hub of community activity and interaction.
While planning and development is ongoing for this proposed plaza, dubbed the Free to BE Village, their programming continues to reach communities well beyond their brick and mortar walls. In addition to several education outreach initiatives, for the past several years, the organization has hosted Fridays on the Lawn summer concerts, providing a free mini block party that the neighborhood loves.
Don’t miss their annual Black Playwrights Festival next week, from August 21 through 24! Experience staged readings of plays in development, and be a part of the process the playwright takes with the organization in perfecting these new works.
- Black Ensemble Theater is located at 4450 N Clark St in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood.
- Learn more here: blackensembletheater.org
Right photo: Founders Renauda Riddle, left, and Angela Barnes.
Nobody’s Darling
This Black-owned LGBTQ cocktail bar opened in 2021, and its swift enthusiastic reception brought more attention to the dwindling number of lesbian bars nationwide. That said, lesbian friends and founders Angela Barnes and Renauda Riddle don’t categorize Nobody’s Darling as a “lesbian bar,” opting to be more inclusive of a wide range of identities that are welcome and safe in their bar. We are so inspired by this establishment’s success, including being named a James Beard Award finalist for Outstanding Bar Program in 2022, and their 2023 space expansion.
This cocktail bar truly embraces all the nuance of diversity and the breadth of identity among the community they foster. You know this was the owners’ goal from the beginning once you learn the origin of the bar’s name: the Alice Walker poem which opens, “Be nobody’s darling; Be an outcast.”
- Nobody’s Darling is located at 1744 W Balmoral Ave in Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood.
- Learn more here: www.nobodysdarlingbar.com
Open TV
It’s possible that when you think of “businesses” you think of brick and mortar establishments for retail, but businesses exist in so many other forms. Occupying both the digital and entertainment production realm is Open Television, or OTV, an award-winning nonprofit platform for intersectional television, with women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists and their creative visions at the center.
Cofounders Aymar Jean Christian and Elijah McKinnon created OTV in 2015 to define “what queer and intersectional TV looks like,” and have built an alternative ecosystem and infrastructure for diverse artists and communities, providing development and community for creators. We applaud the vision and verve of this impressive cohort for creating a niche of their industry to incubate new voices and broaden the diversity of media at large.
- Find original pilots, shorts, series and video art — from Chicago and beyond — on the OTV app, available on all major TV streaming devices and on iOS and Android on mobile.
- Learn more here: www.weareo.tv
Click here to see more businesses we love, in Part 2 of our National Black Business Month posts!
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Click here to see all upcoming public events hosted by Chicagoland businesses at Catalyst Ranch.
