Community Voices: A Public Dialogue with Tenika aka Lady Blue and Six Foota

Every Thursday evening during Portraits and Other Likenesses from SFMOMA, join us in the MoAD galleries for Community Voices: A Public Dialogue. Hear a creative thinker from the Bay Area cultural community reflect on the exhibition’s themes of identity, representation, space, and diaspora, and how these themes inspire the speaker’s practice.

Tenika aka Lady Blue was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. With 10 plus years in the entertainment industry, Lady Blue has been noted for her varied work as a host, make-up artist, plus-size model, and arts education activist. She has appeared as a model in everything from books and magazines to calendars and websites. Lady Blue is the subject of Mickalene Thomas’s Sista Sista Lady Blue (2007), on view in Portraits and Other Likenesses from SFMOMA.

Six Foota, or “Foota,” as she’s affectionately called in the model community, has organized, trained, hosted, and performed in over 56 fashion shows and appeared in print 12 times since 2006. While she still keeps a hand in local fashion events, her passion is strongest when working with inner city youth and her community. Her most prized accomplishment is becoming a mother to her one-year-old daughter, Genesis, who is also a published model. Foota is the subject of Mickalene Thomas’s Lovely Six Foota (2007), on view in Portraits and Other Likenesses from SFMOMA.