Queenpin PGH seeks to connnect black and brown women
At 29, lifelong Monroeville resident Ari Alex could easily pass for a decade younger. Ms. Alex exudes an easy confidence and youthful earnestness that serves her mission well. She doesn’t envision becoming tired or jaded anytime soon, which is a good thing for the ‘Burgh.
Ms. Alex is the director of Queenpin PGH, an organization that is less than a year old, but has been needed for a long time.
Its mission statement reads: “Founded by Pittsburgh blogger Ari Alex, the Queenpin PGH is a community organization existing as a safe space to facilitate the advancement and empowerment of blackwomen and WOC (women of color) in the greater Pittsburgh area. We work in Pittsburgh and surrounding communities to bring more and better representation of black and brown women to the forefront as well as to promote collective economics among WOC -owned businesses.”
Because she believes this demographic is the one most discriminated against by the region’s insular networks of power and privilege, Ms. Alex insists black women and women of color, especially younger women within that cohort, deserve their own association that is collegial, practical, audacious and forward-looking.
“I want to make Pittsburgh a destination city [for these women, too],” Ms. Alex said. “I want to make Pittsburgh a place where black women come to and feel welcome — much like the Essence Fest.” The Essence Festival is an annual gathering of music and culture that celebrates black women and is held in places like Atlanta and New Orleans.
“Every year people say, ‘I’m going to Essence Fest. It’s a beautiful black experience, black girl magic,’” said Ms. Alex. “I want to create something, whether it is a convention or an annual summit where Pittsburgh is known as the place where they have that ‘dope black women’s conference every year.’”
To that end, Queenpin PGH, which began in the online community that coalesced around Ms. Alex’s blog www.allthingsari.com/ THE-QUEENPIN-PGH, is working on becoming a nonprofit. Ms. Alex is getting advice on grant writing from women in her network and hopes Queenpin will become a fulltime endeavor. Until then, she freelances, works part-time and stitches together what she can in a gig economy. The biggest expenditure right now in Queenpin PGH is the time she devotes to it.
“The blog is about plusfashioned beauty, advocacy and growth,” Ms. Alex said. “I would [write] things that would bring all of those pieces together.”
When Ms. Alex wrote a blog post this year about the Super Bowl boycott by high profile black entertainers after former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was blackballed for kneeling before games in solidarity with victims of police violence, she found a community of like-minded women cheering her on.
Ms. Alex created an outfit that included a parody of the official NFL logo that substituted “BLM” [Black Lives Matter] in its place. She took pictures of herself wearing the outfit in front of Heinz Field around Super Bowl Sunday “to push the envelope a bit” and to advertise her disagreement with the NFL.
“As I was doing this, I was coming across an amazing network of women in Pittsburgh that were hustling,” Ms. Alex said. “[They] were changing the way things were going in their neighborhoods. They were activists and business owners, and so I started working with them and highlighting them on my blog.
“As I did that and found more people and met more amazing women, I realized that this was such a powerful network, it needed to be something that everybody could benefit from.”
Ms. Alex, a graduate of California University of Pennsylvania, says that her primary collaborators on the blog are “double minorities” — being both female and women of color.
“Having a place to [express] your point of view or to be seen, or to be heard knowing that your experiences are validated, that’s what we’re about,” she said. “At Queenpin, you can talk about going into an all white workplace and [what it means to have to] answer questions about your hair.”
Black women and women of color in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area are Queenpin PGH’s main focus, though Ms. Alex would love to expand the scope and influence of the group beyond the Pittsburgh region.
For her part, Ari Alex was inspired by a “body positive” group in Pittsburgh started by Jamie Hamilton (aka Jamie JeTaime) called Yinz Bopo or Yinz Body Positive.
Ms. Hamilton started her group two summers ago. “They would do swim meetups and just be visibly out and about without being ashamed of how they look or how people perceive them. I saw how good it was for the community,” Ms. Alex said.
“Jamie gave me some pointers and showed me how she did her start-up stuff. I decided I was going to start doing mixers,” Ms. Alex said.
Queenpin PGH, which was in October 2018, had its first mixer in March at Sugar & Smoke, a blackowned restaurant in Bloomfield that specializes in Southern cuisine. It went so well, Ms. Alex has decided to have as many mixers at the restaurant as she can. Queenpin PGH has also had several photo shoots for various online platforms to show the range of representation of black women and WOC the group hopes will help define it in the larger community.
Besides the official website, there’s also a Queenpin PGH Facebook group and word is spreading on social media. None of this is surprising to Ms. Alex.
“This is something that we need,” she said. “This is about the need for our people, and specifically black women, to be protected, cared about and supported the way we need to be instead of falling through the cracks.”
Among her greatest joys after establishing Queenpin PGH is the opportunity to collaborate with other groups of like minds.
“We just had a huge event at the August Wilson Center called ‘Black Women in Art: Paint on Canvas.’ I teamed up with LaShawn Murray, the founder of the Thirsty Mind Collective.”
It was an evening featuring three local black women artists along with panel discussions about the importance of elevating feminine voices of color and influence in art.
Queenpin PGH has been so busy of late, that it has brought on three interns in the last few months. “It’s growing and people are interested. It’s really cool when I tell people I started an organization called Queenpin and they tell me that their friend had already told them about it.”
She it’s not where she wants it be yet, but it’s going faster than she expected.
“Pittsburgh is an awesome city. There are a lot of hidden treasures here,” Ms. Alex said. “The problem is that they’re hidden. If we don’t have a movement [like Queenpin PGH], then they’re going to stay hidden and our narratives are going to be lost.
“Queenpin is a space that empowers people who are overlooked. I want it to be a space that quenches a thirst in our community.”