The crash of the waves is a clarion call. For Gwenna “GiGi” Gainer Lucas, the pull of the sea is a low-thrumming signal that reverberates through her being. The surf brings reflection and rebirth.
“I am very aware of the joy and peace that surfing brings to me,” says Lucas ’01 from her oceanside home in Jacksonville Beach, Fla.
It wasn’t always this way. For a while, she stepped away from the water that helped shape her childhood. She never even considered dipping her toes into Lake Michigan when she was a student at Northwestern. And the sea was the furthest thing from her mind when she worked in retail development for Nike and Kate Spade in New York City.
“There was a long period when I lost my identity,” Lucas says. “I was building this facade of ‘I have to have the VP title and make X amount of money to be successful.’ But I knew at my core that something needed to change.”
The epiphany occurred in 2012 at the wedding of her college roommate Crystal Clark ’01 in Costa Rica. (Clark is now an associate professor at the Feinberg School of Medicine.)
“I took a surf lesson,” Lucas recalls, “and the minute I stepped on the board, I thought, ‘This is it. This is what I’ve been missing.’ I knew it instinctively.”
She spent the next 15 months figuring out how to get back on the board. She quit her job and returned to Costa Rica, where she spent a year doing contract consulting work when not riding the tides and swells. Eventually, she felt called to get more young girls of color into the sport — one that, in the United States at least, has been historically dominated by white men.
Lucas is the founder and executive director of SurfearNEGRA (which roughly translates to “Black female surfer” in Spanish), a nonprofit whose mission is to bring cultural and gender diversity to surfing. The organization helps pay for girls who live near the water to attend surf camps and, for those landlocked or uncomfortable swimming, opportunities to learn the fundamentals of the sport on terra firma. It’s all part of her effort to diversify the “lineup,” the place in the water where surfers sit on their boards to ensure the best access to breaking waves.
Lucas is also a founding member of Textured Waves, a collective of Black women who want to increase the visibility of diverse surfers. In 2020 the collective created the short film Sea Us Now, which re-imagines classic surfing scenes of the 1960s with Black women surfers.
“This initiative created beautiful imagery of women of color who thrive in their aquatic lifestyle — imagery that was nonexistent in mainstream media,” says Lucas.
On the Side of Right from Seea on Vimeo.
Reader Responses
I found out about GIGI from a feature “Wavemakers” on the Nautica website, what an inspiration!
—Michael Gardner Flossmoor, Ill.
GiGi needs some surf time in Hawaii, the birthplace of surfing. There is no exclusivity here about surfing — it's all about talent, focus and an eagerness to learn. It's never about the color of your skin, ethnicity or sexuality or gender.
—Anne Wright Honolulu, via Northwestern Magazine
Thank you for featuring GiGi Lucas on the cover of the spring 2021 issue. It was inspiring to read about her personal journey and the work she is doing to make surfing more accessible to the next generation of surfers of color.
—Ifeolu Sered '11 MBA, Brooklyn, N.Y., via Northwestern Magazine
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