URe:AD TV is a transmedia “network” produced through a global open call for media and comprising fresh, contemporary audiovisual work by and for the African diaspora. Challenging the narrow, stereotypical, and banal aspects of both popular media and art-institutional framing of Black representation, URe:AD TV grows and changes with new submissions, producing new work with artists in the cities on its tour. Curated by Shani Peters and Sharita Towne. The United Re:Public of the African Diaspora is a dream manifest in shared yet undefinable likeness. The collective, born of two Black women, now comprises an expansive group of artists, thinkers, and makers. Its vision sets sight toward a future that’s as connective in ideology as it is disparate in aesthetic. Its stylization is intentional, functioning in regard to a Black public, reconciling the way our spirits have persevered through centuries of starting over. The ever-evolving cohort includes practices from the reaches of Zimbabwe, Brazil, and the North American cities of Chicago, Cleveland, Portland, and New York. The concatenated videos, writings, and actions are shades of what is possible when Black is a term divorced from nationality. Blackness is more than a country, intonation, or binary tracing of heritage—it’s the spirit of a cultural joy in spite of a societal insistence otherwise. Black consciousness and Black solidarity are the keys to our survival and prosperity, and URe:AD is a sampling of that, in motion and record. URe:AD is the Black landscape reimagined as any number of worlds existing simultaneously for balance in our cultural ecosystem. Its aesthetics make visible the cultural and political actors that are so often placed at the margins of the shot. URe:AD redefines the margins through the most beautiful strategy: starting a document all its own. In the pages of its publishing and the screens that carry its images, URe:AD supposes that Blackness doesn’t derive its meaning from its proximity to a standard of white. Black is not opposite of, but stands proudly in contrast and balance to. These videos are for us—and “us” is hard to parse with words. URe:AD knows who, and lets its artists and writers explain as much for themselves. These explanations come by way of poetic musings about the stars and both the far and near lands they blanket. The diaspora is a cultural continuum. An ever-evolving consideration of Blackness is its vehicle. And perhaps most importantly, the “republic” is United. – Ashley Stull Meyers