Growing up black, queer, and impoverished in Memphis, I've always been expected to work far harder than my more privileged peers and build a platform for myself. I guess you could say that I'm achieving that goal, because I can do you one better with this prompt: Instead of sharing what I would do, I'll tell you what I've done in order to influence a social issue within my community, and how it can help me continue to influence my environment. I'm a recently graduated high school senior who is consumed by the prospect of becoming a fine arts student. If you know me personally, you know that goal is definitely not out of left field, and is (fortunately) more tangible of a goal than I thought it'd ever be. As a person who constantly creates art as a response to the world around me, I always think about how my art can affect others within the spaces I reside in. During my last year of high school, I got the opportunity to use my art as a tool to uplift myself and others who wouldn't necessarily have an entrepreneurial platform to express themselves in the art realm. We began with an analysis of where we grew up and a starting question: Artists within our age bracket have important ideas to express, but do not have a platform or the resources to share and sell work that they are passionate about. How can we uplift student artists to express important, complex ideas while giving themselves a financial platform to jump off from in their post-secondary career? Eventually, we came up with an answer. We immersed ourselves in our year-long project, The Moth's Market Collective, a student-made and student-ran website that hosts talented artists from our school, Crosstown High, in Memphis. While creating a website isn't the most difficult thing for a tech-savvy group of teenagers to do, creating a brand with a mission is. We had a mental checklist of expectations for ourselves that needed to be met in order to feel like we made an impact for ourselves and peers. The main things on our radar were organization, brand identity, diversity, and longevity. In other words, we wanted a sleek final product made by a group of diverse student creators that could also be passed on to another student leader after we graduated. This website needed to live on to give other students leadership, art, and entrepreneurial experience. The heart of our project was holding ourselves accountable by founding an artist collective in charge of creating a body of work, which involved many hours outside of school and other obligations creating high-quality pieces of art. After we had a suitable body of work, we then consulted with each artist to fulfill their supply and printing needs. The goal was to establish a trusted net of fellow artists who felt like they could comfortably share and create amongst each other, as well as uplift each other. We constantly shared meaningful ideas, making sure to use our graphic design and art teachers as helpful resources to understand branding and marketing in art. At the end of the school year, our collective not only launched our website for people to visit in real time, but we also organized our team to physically sell their works at a school exhibition. After successfully building a community of artists, we finally felt confident in creating a platform to impact others through our artwork. I'm proud to say that our project helped elevate the people who will be changing the world in the near future.

Hello! I'm Nisa, and I've had an intense love for art since the beginning of my childhood. Most of my time as a kid was spent watching my dad make a living selling custom airbrushed T-shirts to people within our community, and as soon as I became a fully sentient kid, I became enthralled in making my own artwork as a way to critically think about my environment. I found myself immersed in fictional worlds from the DC Universe, dark contemporary painters and illustrators, and from video games, but it also goes without a doubt that my environment in the real world and somewhat traumatic experiences impact how I utilize art in my everyday life. I was raised in an extremely impoverished community and experienced the firsthand consequences of racial disenfranchisement, and by the time I reached high school, it became more apparent how my experiences transformed me into an intelligent and autonomous, but heavily disadvantaged person. Around the time I reached tenth grade, I started burying myself in contemporary issues, activism, and intersectionality between race, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomics. I began utilizing my artwork to explore the way that I navigate a world that can be hostile to me as a black queer person, while acknowledging my juxtaposition in the universe as a human. My artworks became tools that helped me to understand that although there is futility and adversity in life, I have the ability to harbor intrinsic motivation and a unique drive to succeed. I take the lessons I learn from my art and remind myself that I was put here to do something that puts a mark on the world, just like the first mark on a new canvas.

Hi, I'm Nisa, and everyday I wonder about what's next: What should I eat for lunch? What clothes should I wear? Who will impact my life today? Apparently, the answer to the latter is this scholarship. As a chronic wonderer, I often redirect my thoughts into creative practices like art, writing, and music, which help me address unanswered questions and provoke thought in others: through the grotesque and beautiful, through life and death, and most importantly, through existence and essence. Wondering is a treacherous, but amazing journey that led me to you. Stick around for the adventure and who knows what will happen!

I'm Nisa Williams, and I believe art and music are both underestimated tools that can be utilized to spread impactful messages. When you think about impacting a society, what do you see? Perhaps there's an image of a great figure quoting something that we continue to live by, or a group of people helping the needy. These are impactful actions that encourage a flourishing community, but how can we portray those actions and other events that bring us closer to an endearing society? This is where the arts play an integral part in cultural and societal development. I'm an avid painter and piano player myself, and I appreciate these tools' ability to abstract a moment in time and bring vibrancy to what was once lost. Not only can it bring new perspective to the past, present, and future, but it can illustrate new moments all on its own by evoking emotions that one can't quite grasp. Art and music are pivotal in communicating universally, as it can reach an array of people with varying backgrounds without the need for linguistic understanding. As a senior in high school, I've come to reflect on how much of a grasp art has on my life. I love the form of communication so much that I've applied and been accepted to art colleges with the full intention of using art as an agent of change within my community. This is an evolution of what I previously used my art to focus on, which was doubt and unanswered questions about myself and my meaning. Crazily enough, while using art as a tool to understand my place in the world, I realized my meaning lies in my artwork. It's exciting and refreshing to know that I have use of a versatile tool that can help me understand not only intrinsic conflicts, but extrinsic observations as well. Understanding how my own environment functions has become integral in accurately portraying something that can provoke thought within my own community. On the other side of the coin, taking a step into a new environment via art college can be a tumultuous journey. That's where my love for music comes in. While my art represents the multiple times I've bumped my head trying to understand my environment, I can use music to reflect on the path of least resistance. Every day, I use my keyboard to compartmentalize my feelings about the world around me, as well as how the world affects me and others intrinsically. Music is an extremely powerful tool for introspection, and that ability to look inside myself allows me to function as a more positive human who can make an equally positive impact on society. In a nutshell, art and music are like two well coordinated forces within my life, and I'd like to use that positive energy to encourage others to think and strive to understand their juxtaposition in the world. I believe everybody who seeks to be an agent of change should be critical in their understanding of the world, and that art and music serve as integral tools to reach that understanding.

Since childhood, I've always been unique in my sense of style, the way that I act, and the way that I confront certain situations, which led to years of bullying. Although I hadn't seen anything wrong with myself, others did, and I began to perceive myself through others' eyes. All that I had applauded myself for had immediately become my worst insecurity, and as I continued to grow, I fixated on those insecurities in increasingly complex ways. My coping mechanisms became harmful, and my parents were oblivious because I had grown to understand that they were battling mental illness as well. Fortunately, upon entering high school and maturing even more, I learned how to focus my frustrations into more healthy and productive coping mechanisms, which is when I began pouring my heart into visual arts and music. During the past three years, I've become more emotionally mature, gained a supportive network of friends, and become more confident in myself due to my newfound ability to process complex emotions through illustration. I am currently entering my senior year of high school and applying to art colleges around America, and due to the work that I put in to better myself mentally, I've uplifted my father as well. We are currently working on a very large series of murals that have been eight months in the making, and I've never seen him more proud of how far I've come. Not only have I uplifted myself through art, but I've uplifted those who care to see me grow in addition to my city's community via our large mural project. I can leave Memphis City knowing that I and my dad have left a mark on the slow, but steady revitalization of our most cherished landmarks.

Hello! I'm Nisa, and I've had an intense love for art since the beginning of my childhood. Most of my time as a kid was spent watching my dad make a living selling custom airbrushed T-shirts to people within our community, and as soon as I became a fully sentient kid, I became enthralled in making artwork. I was inspired mainly by immersive worlds from the DC Universe, dark contemporary painters and illustrators, and from video games, but it also goes without a doubt that my environment and somewhat traumatic experiences impact how I utilize art in my everyday life. I was raised in an extremely impoverished community and experience the firsthand consequences of racial disenfranchisement, and by the time I reached high school, it became more apparent how my experiences transformed me into an intelligent and autonomous, but jaded person. Around the time I reached tenth grade, I started burying myself in contemporary issues, activism, and intersectionality between race, sexuality, gender, and socioeconomics. The paintings below are part of a year-long series that explore the way that I navigate a world that can be hostile to me, while acknowledging my juxtaposition in the universe as a human. These pieces in particular were tools that helped me to understand that although there is futility in life, there is also intrinsic motivation and a unique drive to succeed. I take the lessons I learned from these art pieces and remind myself that I was put here to do something that puts a mark on the world, just like the first mark on a new canvas.