Author: Andie Freeman
Header image: Dare Coulter. Photo by Lauren Lindley Photography, courtesy of Dare Coulter.
Dare Coulter is a visual artist whose work exudes joy and energy. Born in Augusta, Ga., and raised in Lorton, Va., she has lived in and around Raleigh for most of her adult life. She graduated from N.C. State University with a bachelor’s degree in art and design and was strongly influenced by classes she took at Meredith College from Holly Fischer. She credits Fischer's guidance for giving her support during a difficult time, changing her life path and helping her find passion for her work. Dare’s work has been most visible in the Triangle, where she has done murals and public art installations and participated in exhibitions. You can also find her illustrations in about a dozen books. One of these is My N.C. from A – Z, written by Michelle Lanier and published in 2019 in association with the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission and the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. In 2024, Dare’s illustrations for An American Story—a book by the author and poet Kwame Alexander—won the Coretta Scott King Book Award for illustration. At only 30 years old, this made her one of the youngest artists to receive that distinction.
Andie Freeman, the Arts Council’s content and social media manager, checked in with Dare to hear about her recent work and her upcoming projects.
Andie: Working with Kwame Alexander on An American Story must have been a great experience. How did that project and receiving the Coretta Scott King Book Award affect your work?
Dare: When I was chosen to work on the project, my agent told me, “This is going to be your PhD in the children's book illustration process,” and it absolutely was. I learned so much. Kwame Alexander is a phenom. He's a brilliant, brilliant man. And he's producing artwork right now that is exceptional. It’s like he’s supernova-ing his way through space. So, for me, the collaboration of working with Kwame and going on tour together was such a blessing. He's just so good at all the parts and pieces that are involved in being a public figure in the literary world. I think he's unwilling to fail because he knows what it means for people when he succeeds. His work inspires people, and people show up at his signings with manuscripts that they wrote because they talked to him five years ago.
On tour we met a little Black kid and his mentor at a bookstore in Charleston. Later, his mentor told us that after the event, the kid said, “I didn't know that Black people could write books. And I didn't know that Black people could speak, and people would listen. I mean, like really listen, right?” That's trajectory-changing for a young Black child, in a place like Charleston, South Carolina, with its specific history. And so, I don't mean it metaphorically when I say that when he succeeds, it changes lives.
It fortifies my commitment to being my best self because I know what that does for other people, too. For example, when I do school visits by myself, those kids will come up and tell me, you’ve changed my life. I met a little boy who's Russian, and he told me, “I will never forget you.” I get to make an impact.
Andie: An American Story talks about American slavery “through the voice of a teacher struggling to help her students understand its harrowing history.” What are some of the lessons you've learned through the process of creating and promoting the book?
Dare: So, talking about the difficulty of having these conversations with children, the first step is humanizing the people who were enslaved, because in much of the retelling about slavery, the conversation doesn't typically humanize the people. It breaks slavery down to facts and figures and statistics. I thought about how to humanize the subject matter before anything else, to talk about this thing that happened to these people who were humans, and emphasizing they were humans. Denying Black people their humanity is what allowed such a miscarriage of justice. Humanity requires that we deal with hard things, so we don't repeat them.
Andie: You paint, draw, and sculpt, and in An American Story, you used sculpture as part of your illustration. Why was that part of your concept for these illustrations?
Dare: Sculpture is absolutely my favorite medium, but sculpture in the context of An American Story was used to humanize the subjects. It's a 3D medium and humans are in 3D versus 2D. You can paint something, and that can be painted hyper-realistically, but when you're using sculpture, suddenly you have a thing that has planes, it has shadows, it has light. You can't smell these sculptures, but when I'm working on them, they smell like skin because clay is an organic material, and it just gives life to a subject in a way that drawings don’t.
Andie: Tell me about your current and upcoming projects?
Dare: I just finished Wheels— It’s a public art project that I did outside of a skating rink in Durham. I worked with a fabricator: Dylan Selinger, of Oak City Customs. We made these pieces; the tallest one is 18 feet tall. It's taller than the building.
This space is a passion project, and it intersects all of things that I love. It's drawing, it’s sculpture, it's fabricated stuff, and it's a physical thing in real space. I get to do this work because I conceptualized that it could exist. The call for art for that project was for a mural, and I was like, hey, I can make this sculptural. And this piece has 29 or 30 figures in it. So, because I got excited about that, and because I had a fabricator who was excited, I was able to make this project. It's the stuff of my dreams.
At the opening of Wheels, people were like, wow, this is special, and it feels like my childhood memories. And I just love that.
I have three books that are coming out. Your Crown Shines: For Ketanji Brown Jackson and You, by jessica Care moore, comes out in June. There’s another Kwame Alexander book, and there’s a third book that hasn’t been announced yet. I also have two projects for the City of Raleigh. One is for Method Community Center, and the other is for John P. “Top” Greene Community Center, which is planned to be renamed John P. “Top” Greene African American Cultural Center.
I feel really grateful for the speed with which I've gotten to where I am. You know, there’s that whole thing about it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. I'm grateful for the journey. But the best part is the destination, being in this space where I get to do these things. This is what I've been trying to get to, and I'm so grateful to be able to be here so early. I think this still counts as early in my career.
Andie: What message would you give a young artist starting out now?
Dare: I don't know if kids I meet at school visits understand how much I mean it when I say that the best thing, the coolest thing, I could be doing with my time is being there talking to them. When I do school visits, I give out bracelets. They say, “Dare Coulter’s Squad,” but they also say, “I am capable, which means I can do anything.”
I ask them, what does capable mean, and a kid will raise their hand and say, “It means you can do anything?” And I say yes, it means you can do anything, and I want you guys to remember, no matter where you are, that you're capable and you can do anything. I believe in you. And I have them say, “I am capable.”
That's why I love what I do. I get to change lives, and I don't mean that lightly. I mean that in the biggest, most loving way possible. I do what I do, because I get to change lives doing it.