Shalicia Johnson is a Madison-born photographer and the owner of ArrowStar Photography, where she specializes in community photography, business portraits, and family portraiture. Before picking up a professional camera, she spent 28 years in early childhood education, primarily with infants and toddlers in a continuity of care model. That work, and the deep observational practice it required, shapes everything about how she photographs people today. In this episode, Angela and Shalicia cover a wide range of topics including:

Growing up in Madison and the forces that nearly redirected her path;
What 28 years with babies teaches you about the world; Feeling a photograph versus seeing one; Community photography as documentation and history-keeping and much more.

Connect with Shalicia: ArrowStar Photography is on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, Bluesky, and Google.

#BlackOxygenPodcast #BlackPodcasts #Wisconsin #BlackInWisconsin #BlackPhotographers #ArrowStarPhotography #BlackPodcasters #MadisonWisconsin #WisconsinPhotographer

Angela welcomes back the very first Black Oxygen guest, Opal Tomashevska — a Madison native, credit union leader, poet, and newly elected board president of the Lussier Community Education Center — for a rich conversation on community care as resistance. Rooted in Opal's story of growing up in Wexford Ridge and coming of age through community institutions, they explore how the cooperative model of credit unions, Black professional affinity spaces, and tight-knit circles of accountability have sustained Black women through systems that were never designed with them in mind.

The conversation takes a deeper turn as Angela and Opal examine what it truly means to belong — not just to be welcomed — and the quiet cost of spending years hustling for worthiness in corporate spaces. Against the backdrop of an alarming and underreported wave of Black women's displacement from the workforce, they reflect on codependency, self-abandonment, and what it looks like to finally stop making yourself smaller to stay safe. Opal's closing vision: a Black Women's Renaissance is already underway — and it is being built on belonging to oneself first.

Key Themes Community care as resistance · Welcoming vs. belonging · The cooperative finance model and credit unions · Black professional affinity spaces and ERGs · Hustling for worthiness · Self-abandonment and reclaiming agency · Black women and workforce displacement · Modeling self-care for our children · Intergenerational community impact · The Black Women's Renaissance

#BlackOxygenPodcast #BlackPodcasts #Wisconsin #BlackInWisconsin #UpperMidwest #Diversity #Inclusion #Belonging

What if the story you've been afraid to tell is the exact story someone else needs to hear?
New episode of Black Oxygen is live, and this conversation with Danielle Hairston-Green hit different.
Danielle is a Moth Story Slam winner, host, storyteller, and director at UW-Madison Extension. She came to Wisconsin from Philadelphia by way of Texas. Eight years later, she's still here, and she has things to say.

We talked about community care, shame, healing, and what it means to stop being the subject of someone else's narrative and become the author of your own.

Her mentor told her: tell your stories from your scars, not your wounds.
This one will stay with you.

#BlackOxygen #BlackOxygenPodcasts #Storytelling #CommunityCare #BlackInWisconsin #TheMothMadison

Embracing Arms - https://www.embracingarms.com/our-team

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/hairstongreen/