These Collectors of Black Memorabilia Want to Reframe What It Means

For decades, antique stores, resale shops, and eBay have lumped all collectibles relating to African-American history under "Black Americana" or "Black memorabilia." These monikers sometimes include racist objects like mammy jars or "jolly" coin banks created during the Jim Crow era to reflect harmful stereotypes about African Americans. While some historians and collectors argue that artifacts depicting offensive, anti-Black imagery are important and can be used to teach the fullness of the Black experience, others have a harder time finding beauty or joy in items that were made only to degrade.

That’s why some collectors, including Jannah Handy and Kiyanna Stewart of Brooklyn antique concept shop BLK MKT Vintage, are working to reframe what Black Americana can mean. The curator couple, who authored BLK MKT Vintage: Reclaiming Objects and Curiosities That Tell Black Stories (released October 15, 2024) believe that it’s up to collectors to reclaim Black ephemera. Handy and Stewart’s shelves—both in their online shop (their Bed-Stuy storefront closed in summer 2024) and their own home—are filled with vintage Dionne Warwick posters, Eddie Murphy tour T-shirts, and Do The Right Thing lobby cards. They celebrate a richer representation of Black history in America, rather than the pain.

As the pair write in their book, vintage collectors must recast the past to create the future, reckoning with what they call "nostalgic dissonance"—the idea that historical accounts accepted as widespread truth often exclude a number of diverse viewpoints. The phrase, Stewart says, came from discussions the couple would have while hunting for vintage treasures at thrift stores, antique shows, and basement digs, and from as far away as Thailand. "We were just trying to articulate the distance between the ways Black folks in our material culture are valued, labeled, and discussed in these public spaces versus the ways we know Black folks to be centered in our own historical narratives, our own coming of age stories, and our own experiences."

In the introduction to BLK MKT Vintage, filmmaker Spike Lee (a Brooklyn resident and customer of Stewart and Handy’s, as well as a notable collector) writes that people often collect Black ephemera "as a tribute to those who came before." Through Black material culture in contemporary life—the Essence and Ebony magazines and ’90s rap and R&B vinyls, the signed Sonia Sanchez softcovers and HBCU pennants from the ’70s—Black people can start to place and locate themselves culturally, connecting "with whatever ancestors [they] can," Lee writes, adding: "We don’t all know our power because we’re not all connected to the power of our ancestors."

Stewart and Handy are certainly doing their part on that front, both by building their own Afrocentric antiques collection and by helping guide other interested parties into that world. While work by Black artists increasingly fetches quite a lot of money at auction (though, Handy says, "whether that valuation leads to compensation is another question"), the couple’s work affirms that there’s an enormity of collectibles that tell Black stories, and are by Black people, beyond fine art. In fact, there are collectors all over the world sourcing and selling everything from old photographs to vintage clothing from streetwear brands like Rocawear and Karl Kani.

When Stewart and Handy announced their book in 2022, they wrote on Instagram it would be like "The Black Book meets Antiques Roadshow meets your mama’s basement and grandma’s Danish ‘cookie’ tin," and reading through its 288 pages, that feels true. The couple not only detail their own collecting, selling, and relationship with their items, but also interview other Black collectors and archivists, like Everthine Antiques founder Megan Dorsey, who shares how she got into the antiques game as well as her thoughts on non-Black people who collect Black cultural ephemera.