About

The Creative Side is an innovative art consultancy, and creative design business enterprise founded by Atim Annette Oton, a curator, designer, and enterpreneur, who lives in Jersey City, after moving from Brooklyn, and works in the New York City area.

Leadership:

Curator, Designer, Editor and Entrepreneur Atim Annette Oton is a Nigerian-born, American and British educated designer. She is the founder of The Creative Side, an innovative business, as well as the director and cuarator at Calabar Gallery since 2016 and was the co-owner of Calabar Imports, a 20 year old Brooklyn retail business.

She was the African Art Curator for AMREF Health Africa ARTBALL, Curator and producer for 54 Artists for 54 African Journeys, Curator and producer of Destination Bed Stuy, Organizer of Bed Stuy Arts Stroll and Harlem Arts Stroll, Curator for Mind-Builders Creative Art Center and was the project outreach curator for Bronx:Africa exhibition at the Bronx Council on the Arts.

She co-founded of Black Design News Network and was a Huffington Post Black Voices Blogger who created the series, The Pulse of Africa where she wrote about Global Africans working in Africa and across the Diaspora and has an inside view on Africa’s progress, issues on arts and culture, technology and opportunities. She spent her formative years in Calabar, Nigeria and studied architecture at the City College of New York and did graduate studies at the Architectural Association Graduate School in London, England.

In New York, she worked in architecture and by 2000, was part of the design team that won the African Burial Ground Interpretive Center. She worked as an executive producer on the Underground Railroad Experience, a cultural education website on the Underground Railroad and won an Independent Grant from the NYSCA for her work, the Black Hair Salon.

A founder of Blacklines Magazine, a quarterly magazine featuring black designers, she served as its executive vice president before joining Parsons School of Design as the Associate Chair of Product Design for 6 years. In 2006 she launched Calabar Magazine as a brand extension of her store Calabar Imports in Brooklyn. After creating Calabar Imports in 2004, she has expanded the store to 3 store neighborhood locations in Brooklyn (Crown Heights, Bed Stuy and Harlem).

As founder of the Creative Side, she selects projects that are about art, community and artists.