Scrolling through Instagram recently, you may have stumbled across Ryann Beckham SC ’27, Chimuanya Chukwuocha PO ’28 or Shiraz Smith CM ’27 posing in editorial-style photographs. No, they aren’t in Vogue yet: This is BLAREMONT MAG.
BLAREMONT MAG is a magazine project highlighting Black 5C students, pioneered by Creative Director and Editor-in-Chief Rahim Chilewa PZ ’27 and sponsored by the Pitzer Black Student Union (BSU) and the Office of Black Student Affairs (OBSA). The magazine features important parts of students’ identities through photographs, videos and written stories.
“It’s a magazine about Black people for Black people, with the images of Black people, the stories of Black people and the realities that they inhabit,” Chilewa said. “We’re dropping weekly stories covering students, covering their realities.”
Stories from BLAREMONT MAG have been released weekly on OBSA and Pitzer BSU’s Instagram accounts for the past month. OBSA, where Chilewa works as a fellow, is funding and distributing the magazine, whose first print issue will drop in early March.
A goal of BLAREMONT MAG is to help Claremont’s Black community see each other on campus and in a magazine.
“I think the image is really powerful,” Chilewa said. “To have a visual representation of that demographic is extremely important because it does something for people. When you see someone that looks like you on a magazine, it opens up a whole realm of possibilities.”
Each story in BLAREMONT MAG features a Black 5C student discussing their passions. Past topics have included fashion, family and creating music. The photos and videos in the magazine use props, wardrobe, lighting and skillful editing to create aesthetically interesting magazine pages.
“Behind the final image, behind the final story, is hours of research,” Chilewa said. “How do I wanna tell the story? What colors do I want [featured students] to wear? What setting do I want them to be in? How do I want to write the caption to tell their story?”
While each story has its own distinct characteristics, their overall style is cohesive.
When photographing Beckham, his first model, Chilewa decided to focus on style, which Beckham describes as a pillar of her identity. For her cover, Beckham models several outfits — which she chose herself — alongside text describing her style inspirations.
“It’s one of those little things that I take the time to do every morning,” Beckham said, “to decide how I want to embellish myself and how I wanna show up in the world creatively. This way of expressing creative ideas without actually having to produce anything or speak a certain way, but rather something that’s just self-implied and self-stated, is really empowering for me.”
Beckham was struck by how well a creative project like BLAREMONT MAG was able to create community.
“There’s something very unique and important and revitalizing that comes with artistry,” she said. “I think that Black artistry really kind of runs the world in a certain sense, and that is such an important part of what I consider to be Blaremont. I think it’s the perfect creative reflection of that.”
Beckham was struck by how well a creative project like BLAREMONT MAG was able to create community.
The magazine has been building community not only within those who helped create it but also between those who follow and support its features as they are released. Beckham described the excitement surrounding her own feature:
“There’s the work of supporting [the magazine], and there’s the work of knowing about it and talking to each other about it,” she said. “That is absolutely a part of creation and art and getting it out there. It’s just another beautiful thing that brings people together.”
The magazine also aims to affirm the 5C Black community by highlighting their stories outside of solely an academic or extracurricular setting. While academia is not always designed around “highlighting identity or humanness,” Beckham said, “that is instead the work of creativity, the work of art.”
“There’s something really special about having a college student magazine that highlights parts of our identity or parts of our lived experiences that we sometimes have to drop off at the door to actually participate in academia,” she said.
Being featured in the magazine has also helped Beckham realize aspects of her own identity.
“I don’t know if I always see myself necessarily as that person that would be on the cover of a magazine, but I think the beautiful joy in creating student art like this is that there’s a lot of identity-building happening within the process,” Beckham said. “That part of me is there, and it’s just a matter of bringing that out in a creative way.”
BLAREMONT MAG reveals and platforms the identities and stories of Black students through art, as Chilewa envisioned.
“In a lot of ways, the goal of beauty and the goal of art is to reveal a truth,” Chilewa said, “especially when we’re talking about Black communities and Black stories.”
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