After success of Five Points’ acclaimed Museum for Black Girls, founder returns with Culture Museum

Charlie Billingsley’s Museum for Black Girls — a selfie pop-up replete with dense collages and salon-style tableaus from local Black artists — was so consistently popular after its 2021 launch that its founder quickly grew accustomed to international visitors and social media acclaim.

“People from the Caribbean or New York or Los Angeles often shared the same stories our artists were telling,” Billingsley said via phone this week. “The emotions we (evoke) connect us to our memories of when things were different, back when business owners called us by name when we walked into those little corner stores.”

The rampant gentrification of the Five Points neighborhood where the pop-up is located has pushed out many mom-and-pop businesses over the last five years, which is why Billingsley feels lucky to be able to reboot her concept for 2022.

Along with backers Von Ross (Billingsley’s aunt, also an artist) and Leonard “Graffiti” Johnson (a Denver entrepreneur and media figure), Billingsley opened the Culture Museum in late December. It has shifted the focus from underappreciated “Black girl magic,” as she calls it, to a tightly curated, throwback embrace of ’90s (and a bit of the early aughts) hip-hop fashion, art and music.

Black artists such as Sarah Iverson, Jeremiah Black, Regine Cotton, Zaida, Decay Renew, Freedom Waves and Chance are represented in the modular space. Think graffiti, high-topped sneaks, hip-hop luminaries and vibrant, African diaspora-influenced fashion, soundtracked by period-appropriate music and spiked with scenes of barbershops and shoes hanging from a telephone wire.

“It’s similar in that it’s interactive, but it’s more about the things that Black culture has set as trends,” said Billingsley, who also staged a 2019 exhibit celebrating Black women’s hairstyles and beauty care. “It’s still immersive and we still want guests to come in and play around and have fun.”

It’s also an education for younger generations, such as Billingsley’s kids, in both the realms of culture and in the aesthetics and messages of the racial justice movements that continue today. The kids gamely interrogated their mom about the meaning of floppy discs, how music-sharing services such as LimeWire worked, and who certain classic MCs and DJs were (and still are, in most cases).

“That was my time, so it’s cool to bring those things back during a time where people really need a sense of community,” she said. “This is a creative, realistic way of doing that.”

The top-to-bottom redo of the space, at 1439 26th St. in Five Points, is inside a property provided by the EDENS. The real estate owner/developer said that thousands of people (about 3,500 total, Billingsley estimated) moved through the Museum for Black Girls from February through August of last year.

After being open for a mere three months, the Museum for Black Girls’ overall run date had to be extended by another four months to meet demand. The popularity prompted the installation to travel to Houston for a run in another EDENS property, which began on Oct. 16, according to EDENS.

“Charlie’s work to elevate Black voices is necessary and inspiring,” EDENS managing director Tom Kiler said in a press statement. “We’re proud to once again be partnering with her to provide a platform for diverse lived experiences and artistic expression in Denver and Houston.”

In the Mile High City, which is lately awash in trendy, if generic, touring installations that play on childhood brand nostalgia, Culture Museum’s founder is not looking to overwhelm visitors, nor is she trying to compete with the trippy backdrops and elaborate sculptures of other (and far more expensive to enter) installations billing themselves as immersive and selfie-friendly.

Rather, the 10 or so local artists who have so far contributed — as compared with 30 for the Museum for Black Girls — are focusing on a cultural moment over a set of intimate and personalized memories.

Still, the concepts share a joyous embrace of cultural signifiers that continue to be discounted in mainstream American culture. The Museum for Black Girls, for example, featured a vintage, re-created kitchen scene that paid tribute to one artist’s grandmother, while other walls presented collages of famous Black women — something young Black girls never see in public.

It remains a grassroots effort. As with the Museum for Black Girls, Billingsley has launched a crowdfunding campaign (bit.ly/3sGEQKG) to raise money for her artists. The modest, $5,000 goal allows the self-funded effort to be completely independent and reflective of its creators’ aesthetics.