Image: BLK MKT Vintage via Instagram
For many Black Americans, having tangible pieces of our culture and history are far and few between. Still, from that one painting every Black grandma has in their living room to your uncle’s Donna Summer vinyl collection from the 70s, each item carries with it a rich story. While we look to the future, we must inform it through the past.
As partners in business and in life, Jannah and Kiyanna Handy curate antiques, collectibles, and ephemera that highlight Blackness in all of its beauty through BLK MKT Vintage. The couple met at Rutgers University, where they were both higher education professionals working to support students of color in living on campus in residence life. While there, their love for each other and antiques grew from an idea into a full-fledged antique concept shop.
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Fast forward into 2024, and BLK MKT Vintage’s collection of vintage literature, clothing, furniture, housewares, and more have given the Black folks a chance to hold onto moments from the past, connect with our heritage, and pay homage to our ancestors. While the Brooklyn duo have already achieved several cornerstones, including collabs with HBO series Lovecraft Country, Apple, and Chase, with features in Vogue, Architectural Digest, and InStyle, and the opening of a brick-and-mortar store, they’re now adding author to their resume with their book BLK MKT Vintage: Reclaiming Objects and Curiosities That Tell Black Stories.
INTO chatted with the Handys to dish about how antiques were the catalyst for their relationship, give tips on how to start your own collection, and how their business is a love letter to the Black community.
There are many ways in which people can learn how to curate antiques and collectibles, and each person has their own story connected to this journey. What were your individual journeys like getting into curating antiques and collectibles and how did those journeys converge to create BLK MKT Vintage?
Jannah: I came into the vintage world 100% by way of Kiyanna. I have four sisters. I was not about hand-me-downs. I want my own swag. From being a kid and growing up, I just never had that proclivity to be really into the vintage world. [I meet] Kiyanna, and we’re both living on a college campus, and so you just imagine the cinder block walls, the same furniture in every room. But going into her apartment, she had things painted, there [were] so many different types of furniture, there [were] artifacts on the wall, and that was the first time I really saw that you can use material culture and material objects to help tell your story visually. We first started dating and honestly, she loved going to the thrift store. I was trying to spend some time with her. So I was like, “I love going to the thrift store too.” So that really became our escape and we would spend so much time out at different markets on the hunt. That’s really how our paths converged.
Kiyanna: We’re approaching our 11-year anniversary and have been married for one [year], and have also been in business for 10. Very early on in our journey, we not only recognized that we were both stuck with one another, but that we wanted to envision our partnership in different ways, like in this…creative way as well. Jannah mentioned, we were both on a campus in Rutgers University, actually, in New Brunswick, and I was finishing up a master’s program and working, and she was working. We were serving marginalized students of color and it was dope because our work was about creating a home for students on campus and ensuring that they could thrive in their work. And we weren’t necessarily fulfilled professionally. We both felt like there was more that we wanted to do.
I really arrived at this work as a hobby as a young person. As a kid, my mom dragged me to flea markets, estate sales, you name it. She was always stopping on the side of the road to pick things up. Secondhand objects have just always been part of my life, my home, my interior aesthetic. We have to labor to see ourselves and to find vintage and antique objects that are representative of our histories, that are just cool and feel like us. So we wanted to create the vintage shop neither of us had the ability to experience. We were both working full time at that point and then decided to start the business at the same time. It was just the start of the journey from there.
What did it take to go from acknowledging the gap within the antiquing world to creating a full-fledged store?
Jannah: That’s a great question. It took us time to get there. A lot of folks talk about higher ed as like “the golden handcuffs.” It’s such a great gig to stay, that it becomes hard to leave. That really became a huge factor in what we were trying to do. But there really came a point where we were like, our little side hustle is getting in the way of our “9 to 5,” or our “9 to 5” is getting in the way of our side hustle. So we were like, “Something’s got to change.” I’m the kind of person where, if I’m not comfortable somewhere, I might start to act out. I might not be doing my best. So how do we move to a space where we feel like our work is more in line with the lives that we want to live?
So going from just popping up at a weekend market every year here and there to both of us being full-time in the business, we staggered it. I was full-time in the business first, while Kiyanna was still working full-time on campus, so that we kind of had proof of concept and were able to test our sea legs before having both of us go out. Once we were able to see that we did have proof of concept, folks were into it, and that we could actually survive, Kiyanna left her full-time position and then we kind of went off on this journey to eat what we kill and try to make it on our own.
Kiyanna: I feel like the commerce [aspect,] that was the easy transition. It was all of the other aspects of our business that really took time for us. So I’m thinking about offering prop rental services, working on production sets, interior design, and museum loans. All of those are part of the organizational structure and the business that we’ve created. But sourcing and selling the objects was the easy part. And in many ways it is the function that kind of keeps everything running smoothly and keeps us in business. But it took us some time to really figure out how else we could envision material culture being centered. And it was just fun to think about how we extend ourselves and challenge ourselves past a conventional vintage or antique store concept.
Recognizing that you’ve expanded into so many different capacities that allow for a much more holistic approach to that work, which component out of that organizational structure do you feel you resonate with most?
Kiyanna: I love interiors and staging. I like to shop, to source, and to bring things home. But to me, the staging, the interior curation, styling, all of that is about how items are used to tell a story. Just thinking about an object that you find on a shelf, a dusty table or in a basement, and to see that transition to someone’s bookshelf, someone’s coffee table, someone’s nightstand, someone’s gallery wall, to me, it is really about the individual, the story that they’re telling. And to me, it’s just really personal. So that’s my favorite part of this.
Jannah: I would say mine is sourcing, like going out and the treasure hunt of it all, the 6AMs, going out cold to flea markets because you really just never know what you’ll find or what’s going to find you. So I love that piece of it, but also I love the nostalgia of it all that undergirds all the work that we do. I just think about material objects from when I was a kid. I think about a picture in the book where I have a hat on backwards and a Grand Canyon T-shirt and I remember my aunt got me that and talked about how there are Black people who settled by the Grand Canyon. I’m like, “How do I even remember that? I was 12.” The material things around us hold so many stories and being able to provide that for people, whether it be on a production set, whether it be in somebody’s home, whether it be in our store, whether it be on an Instagram post, I just appreciate that we’re able to share so much with the community.
Jannah Handy
“Just as much as our business is a love story to Black people, it’s also a love story to each other.”
I imagine there’s plenty of stories within the items that you’ve curated in your home. What’s one of your favorite ones?
Jannah: There’s an image that we have of, I would probably say it’s a 1910s to 1920s couple. It’s a lithograph. It’s probably like 6 by 4 inches and it’s of a couple that recently got married. There are four of them. Two people got married, best man, maid of honor. They’re transposed on top of a watermelon. So it’s supposed to be like that Dixie era stereotypical kind of propaganda that white folks used to put out. I remember I found this at a flea market maybe two months before we got married. I held onto it, wrote a message on the back of it, and I just loved how I was able to find something that I knew she would love because it looks dope, but also being able to find something that is a piece of our history and connected to such an important day of our history. I just think it’s so special when we’re able to make those connections for each other, because just as much as our business is a love story to Black people, it’s also a love story to each other.
Kiyanna: So someone reached out to us a few years ago, this was actually during the shutdown, early on in the pandemic, and said, “I bought these booking cards. I don’t know what to do with them. I feel like they belong in your collection.” And we were like, “Okay, we don’t have any police booking cards. We’d love to see what these are.” They were all of Black folks in the 1930s and 40s and I don’t know how they would have identified, but we have said that they’re queer folks who were arrested for a number of crimes at the time for cross dressing. You look at each of the booking cards and it lists the crime, one is fairy, one is cross dressing. Thinking about the language that folks used to use to describe what they consider to be transgressive behavior or just different identities, I think what’s really salient [are the] ways that queer folks and history is often erased and violently so. It just makes me think about the duality in memory sometimes. They are so deeply important to us in our collection, but they also represent a lot of trauma as well. And those are also featured in the book.
Obviously we have to talk about your book, BLK MKT Vintage: Reclaiming Objects and Curiosities That Tell Black Stories. What was the impetus behind putting this piece this tome together so that way we all could have it within our fingertips?
Jannah: For us, having a book of our work was probably one of the first things we decided more than 10 years ago. When we sat down and really looked at it, we were just like, “This work clearly deserves more of us. We need to quit our 9 to 5. It deserves that we honor our history. We know that the work we do is important. We know that the work that we’re doing is growing and we need to have a record of our journey and so that we have provenance of the things that we’ve been doing.”
But also, in a world where preserving Black history is evergreen—because folks are always trying to hide, erase, and cancel Black history—it’s just so important for us to have these vindicating evidences, as Arturo Schomburg calls them, that we were here and that our material cultures were valued, but also our cultural production was valued.
Kiyanna: I agree. The book was always coming long before we knew it was in the works. It was always on its way to us and to our community. And books were just like also something early on that we collected. I couldn’t necessarily afford a Kerry James Marshall painting, but I could afford the coffee table book about his work. So there’s something about the book that makes work accessible to people and stories accessible to people. And we wanted to just play with form and do something that was like coffee table-style, that could tell our story, our personal stories, and then the larger stories of all the objects. And so I’m just really fortunate because I think the industry is so dense with stories right now, which is wonderful. It’s a great thing, It’s a great problem to have right now. But to sit amongst so many peers, Black queer folks who are writing their own stories so their stories are not told without them at the helm is just really, really important.
We’re here for the holiday season, and there’s a lot of different opportunities for one, folks to snag your book as a gift, and two, also learn from you two on how to find more gifts through thrifting and antiquing. What would be some best practices or tips that you would give to folks who are also looking to do this through the use of your book?
Jannah: I would say in one of the sections we talk about some DIYs or hacks that you could do on your own. One of the biggest ones is using certain things just to make the holiday more personal, whether it be through your decorations, a favorite picture that you have with Santa when you were a kid, or a family photo that you can blow up that becomes the piece over your mantle for the month of December. You can use family photos for greeting cards so that, you know, now your greeting cards aren’t just the standard car that you get from Target, which I understand makes it a little bit easier. But if you’re able to customize it, people actually will hold on to them. They just hit differently when there’s a little more effort that’s put into the personalization [of] cards and wrapping paper.
Not a seamless plug, but we sell a lot of different wrapping papers on the website. Kiyanna and I, we’re really competitive. Each year we compete around Halloween costumes. We do a public voting on who won. So we started doing this competition and one year I decided to make a custom wrapping paper for it and surprised her. She put it online, and people were like, “When are y’all selling this?” And literally, that’s how it got started. So just have a little bit of fun with your wrapping paper. Have a little fun with your greeting cards. That’ll make that gift hit a little harder.
To sit amongst so many peers, Black queer folks who are writing their own stories, is just really, really important.
Kiyanna Handy
Also, your book has a foreword from Oscar-winning filmmaker Spike Lee How did that come to be?
Kiyanna: Spike Lee is a customer, a client, a big supporter, and fellow Brooklynite. Just in nurturing our relationship over the years, we told him. We started working on the book, and he told us from the jump, “If y’all need anything, just let me know. I’d love to be part of it in any way that I can. Just tell me what you need.” And when it came time to think about how we wanted this book to look and who could write the foreword, we thought he was a perfect choice because he just kind of contextualizes our work. He is an elder to us, and so we felt like we wanted someone who our work is in conversation with, but can speak to vintage, history, and memory work in a different kind of way. And his work is not only nostalgic for us, he uses nostalgia in his own work. So it just made a lot of sense. It felt like the Brooklyn stamp on the project that we wanted and needed. It was a name that folks would recognize, and it just meant a lot to have his support.
How can someone start out curating and creating their own collection of antiques?
Kiyanna: There’s a whole chapter on this in the book at the start of the Vault chapter. [It’s a] series of questions that someone can kind of take, sit with, and answer for themselves in imagining whatever this collection could look like. I’m curious about why you want to collect? What need is it fulfilling for you? What are your interests? What is already around you and your family, or from things that you’ve purchased? What do you want to do with it? Is it something that you want to collect to create monetary value to pass on to be an archive of your family’s materials? Those are just some of the starting questions that I think we should sit with before starting because that can be its own process.
Jannah: I think that’s key and the only thing I would add was just what is your positionality to things? I think that’s really a question that I never really thought about until we moved in together. We’re antique collectors. We have a lot of things. I like things. She doesn’t really like things.
Kiyanna: I don’t like a lot of things.
Jannah: Now we’re also navigating one space together, thinking about, do you have a partner? Who are you living with? What are you collecting? And one thing that a lot of folks don’t think about, if you want to invest in collecting, but you may not like things or have the space to do so, you can send donations to different. You know, Weeksville Heritage Center has an archive, a whole education committee and department that you can donate to. That then is making that work of archiving still happen, but you don’t actually have to happen. So there are creative ways that you can make sure that you’re investing in archiving, even if you’re not the one to do it.
Lastly, what’s next for BLK MKT Vintage?
Jannah: Well, next is. We’re going to reopen our brick and mortar location, but we’re looking for a bigger space. So we’re going to kickstart that at the start of the year. So look for that. Also we’re looking for other ways and different mediums to show our work. Whether it be on a TV screen, whether it be somewhere else. We’re trying to be creative about the ways that we’re able to share history and tell stories. But we’re pretty open.
Kiyanna: Those are what’s next. Ideally growing and scaling in terms of our staff. For the majority of the 10 years that we have been grooving, it’s been the two of us. And I love working with [Jannah], and I want a staff to kind of relieve us so that we can stick with the things that we do really, really well. I think about the plight of entrepreneurs sometimes burning out because they are doing everything and not just the things that they came into the business wanting to do. So I think in order for our business to be as sustainable as we want it, it requires us to hire some staff and with the opening of the new store, that’s one of the goals too. So more folks that are kind of passing on the good news and doing the work alongside us.
Jannah: Yes. And book tour part two. So in January and February we’ll still be doing some events and traveling, plugging the book. So you can see us at least right now in Chicago, St. Louis, Atlanta, Atlanta and then back in Brooklyn in February for a big event that we’re excited to talk about soon.♦
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