Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Radiance Bukari. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Radiance, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?
The name Radical Creations comes from a combination of things, but mostly it is an expression of my existence and experience as a multihyphenate. As a creative working in the corporate world, I realized that I had to find creative ways to stay in touch with my artistry. I felt as though the more distant I grew from practicing my creative passions, the more I was losing my sense of self, and at the same time I wanted a way to keep parts of my artistry separate from any extrinsic motivation like money or empty attention. For me, this meant engaging in my community and my crafts more consistently than I had before. This meant studying writing and music more thoroughly. This meant making a lot of changes in my life and shifting my focus back onto things that filled up my cup, so to speak. Starting my tie-dye business gave me a way to engage with art differently and to see fashion through a new lens, while also giving me space to continue pursuing music and writing without the pressure of success that I had been putting on myself for years. In doing so, I realized that it takes so much effort to embrace and create a healthy separation between my many worlds, but it also became easier to connect them through those changes. At times it felt like the only way I could survive. To actively choose to live, and really understand what that means, when we are conditioned to do anything but, feels RADICAL. To embrace loving, resting, giving, just being, is RADICAL. To accept the idea that you can do more than one thing when we are told to make a choice about how to spend the rest of your life at 17 is RADICAL. To even attempt to find your way back to yourself is RADICAL. I hope to encourage others to find creative ways to connect with themselves through all of my mediums, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to express myself in a multitude of ways. I hope to foster spaces that allow those within my community to do the same and so much more.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I am from Denver, Colorado and have lived in this area all of my life, my mother is a business owner, musician, and realtor (among so many other magical things) from Gainesville, Florida; my father is a business owner, chef, and grill master from Kansas City, Missouri. I was always an artistic child, finding my passions in singing, creative writing, and fashion. Growing up, attending an expeditionary learning charter school (shout out to Odyssey School!) instilled so many integral principles within me that I never realized would be so detrimental until my teenage years. My elementary and middle school years were focused on learning, but learning not just about what was in a text book, my school valued hands-on learning and found ways to connect every lesson to character. This included concepts like compassion, reflection, and responsibility. At the time, I just saw my experience as a “normal” education. It wasn’t until I reached high school that I learned how distant formal education was from those concepts. I struggled to understand the value of studying material only for a test and had to really find a way to reconnect with education at first, because previously I had always been the type of kid who got so excited about school, and about learning in general. I struggled to cope with that shift in lifestyle, figuring out how to navigate these seemingly separate worlds was preparing me for my future, little did I know. My freshman year of high school, I got into choir and theatre, which helped to ground me enough to find joy in this new and vastly different world of education and socialization. In this way, I was introduced to arts not only as a hobby, but as a continuous study which helped to reignite my desire to learn.
I am extremely grateful for my experience as a student at Odyssey School, as it instilled in me how to not only be a good student, but a good person as well. My experience at Overland High School surprisingly showed me the value of a different type of structure which was instrumental in preparing me for college. After high school, I attended the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, Colorado with hopes of studying music, but quickly found myself doubting the validity of a music degree and ended up spending more time socializing than focusing on my education. Eventually I decided to leave school and take a break to figure out what I wanted to do. That was a hard decision, as I had always seen myself as an academic and felt lost without having education as my focus, but allowed me to embrace my own uncertainty and find ways to let go of feeling guilty about it. I moved to Boulder, Colorado with the help of a dear friend from college and jumped into a new environment where I didn’t know anyone, wasn’t connected to any social groups, and was forced to ultimately learn about myself by navigating all of the newness around me. I worked in the service industry and made so many beautiful connections that I still value to this day. Living on my own for the first time outside of college gave me an opportunity to try new things on my own volition. I joined my first band (shout out to B-Love!), I began looking at my passions differently by injecting myself into their respective industries. I also started working in healthcare administration, which was something that I never saw for myself but serendipitously came into. Those life changes, among many others, brought me back to the Denver area, where I continued my healthcare administration journey, and the pandemic brought a change to that as well. I started working in government administration, still in the healthcare sphere, but with a very particular touch of bureaucracy. This is the time in my life where I started to feel extremely disconnected from my artistic self, which lit the fire within me to take my creative expression back into my own hands. I pride myself on my work and was happy to be learning something new, but soon realized that the work ethic I brought with me into my workspace was seldom brought back home. Patient care, though extremely rewarding, is so exhausting at times, so I found myself with no energy after work, and very little motivation to practice my crafts in my free time. I felt my mental space being taken up by a job that I didn’t want, but felt too secure to leave behind.
I am a creature of habit. Once I adjust to a certain structure or routine, I fall all the way in. So this kind of work began to take over my life, to the point where I had to snap out of it every once in a while to remember who I was. I had to find a way to make my work life connect to the rest of my life, which was a real struggle. Education helped me to do this, when I learned of the Free College Program that was offered to union members of my job. I decided to go back to school, which helped me to create discipline in my personal life (which is especially necessary when studying online, or hey, even starting your own business). Making education my focus helped to remind me that I was more than just a worker bee for some large entity. It also helped me connect to the child in me that is so in love with learning and the process of applying lessons learned to real life experiences.
In some ways, it feels radical to grow up the way that I did, especially when I saw how little character was being discussed in other parts of my community. My upbringing has also been a foundational part of why I started my business in the first place. I have always been attracted to anything vibrant, always buying too many loud patterns and not enough plain clothing, always filling my walls with colorful art from floor to ceiling. So when I was in high school and one of my best friends’ parents threw a tie-dye party, I was immediately interested. The idea of designing something that turns out so differently than how it started caught my attention so deeply, that I didn’t even realize how much it would stick with me throughout my life. After not giving much thought to it, besides admiring my own creations, I decided to throw my own tie-dye parties every once in a while, I’d put them on for my family when they visited. It was a perfect activity for kids while still allowing the adults to engage and enjoy themselves, so I started my own tradition.
In 2022 after finally getting my associate’s degree, I threw a tie-dye party to celebrate my achievements and was left with a lot of blank clothing to dye afterwards. I decided to have some fun with it and try new designs, mix colors I wouldn’t usually mix, and create some beautiful pieces just because, but did not want to keep them to myself. After some guidance and motivation from my mom, in August of that year, I registered my LLC, Radical Creations, focused on creating one-of-a-kind tie-dye fashion and tapping in to creative ways to bring the color back into our lives! I was so intrigued by the spontaneity it took to design tie-dye, especially with very little knowledge of how to make the extremely intricate and time-consuming designs, that I found my curiosity for the craft growing, I began to see it as a metaphor for what I was trying to do within myself; I wanted to connect with the most vibrant parts of myself, the parts that felt the truest. Being a black woman growing up in predominantly white areas, color (in both the literal and figurative sense) is a huge part of my identity, so tie-dying felt like an abstract way to think about color and find value in blank spaces. It helped me see the point of feeling lonely, empty, misunderstood, to understand the dichotomy of highs and lows, to play with balance in a fun and beautiful way.
Here at Radical Creations, we offer unique and custom tie-dye apparel for all ages and sizes, we play with space and color. By doing this, we remind our clients of the space they should be taking up, the pride that it is okay to have in doing so, and how to breathe life into the simplest things. We take pride in the care and attention to detail that goes into all of our creations and strive to give everyone the opportunity to use fashion and design to see themselves differently. Fashion is often times the most obvious form of self-expression, as well as the first to be perceived by others, so we keep that in mind when designing our apparel and find ways to highlight the variety of colors in our world and within us. As the owner and designer here at Radical Creations, I want my clients to know that there is never a wrong time to reinvent yourself, and that it can even be your superpower. I want my clients to know that it is okay to wear all black one day and a rainbow the next; we are complex creatures and our fashion and self-expression should reflect just that!
Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?
Funding this business is an example of possibly the most literal connection between my corporate work-life and my creative endeavors. Though it can be a very difficult balancing act at times, having a full-time day job with a very consistent pay schedule can be so helpful when procuring funds for your business. The hard part is reminding yourself of that every time you get paid, as many of us living the day job life get stuck in the cycle of living (and spending) for the weekend which does not always align with the many goals of being an entrepreneur.
It has come down to diligence, planning, and having some level of fiscal responsibility (which is not something we are taught so if you’re still learning, I SEE YOU). It has also come down to the simple fact that all things worth having take some sort of sacrifice, For me this means putting of the festival or the trip until I have all my custom blanks ready for production, this means picking when I get my hair done instead of having a recurring appointment, this means knowing that sometimes all my money is going to bills and my business. Accepting this is accepting the investment that you are making in yourself, even if it feels like a long game.
Funding can feel like a huge barrier for entry, so assessing what you are willing to do to eliminate that barrier can be both exciting and overwhelming. Being a business owner, I am getting very familiar with both of those feelings. Being an artist has luckily prepped me for that, and I try to find gratitude in all of it, including whatever else comes along.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?
As a creative, it became so apparent in my adult life that I looked for creative expression in EVERYTHING. This way of thinking made it hard for me to succumb to certain rigid systems that I felt forced into, and I ended up pushing against force all together until I had completely lost touch with the use of force as a mechanism of discipline. It became not just a way of thinking, but a way of living that was really difficult to formulate into words when interacting with non-creatives, That being said, I don’t really believe in the “non-creative” because I have learned that living takes creativity. I do, however, see a difference between artists and non-artists. There are some people who can live content lives without ever creating something of their own, and that does not make them any less of a person or any less-deserving of love, respect, and compassion. There are some who cannot live at all without creating something of their own. I, obviously, am the latter, but it took me most of my life to become fully aware of that. My connection to art is rooted in feeling and intuition. The art that calls to me, that sticks with me, reflects my most intense emotions and helps me to connect with something bigger than myself that lives both within and all around me. I have found my purpose by trying to create art that does the same for my community and whoever else is willing to engage with it. It can be comforting to know which side you’re on, and accept it. Artists need the non-artists and non-artists need the artists, we create the balance that we’re always trying to replicate.
Contact Info:
- Website: linktr.ee/radiancebukari
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/radicalcreationsllc?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100084564647448&mibextid=ZbWKwL
Image Credits
Samantha Musgraves of Parasidity LLC Sipar Saydaliev