Imagining Freedom at Denver Art Museum
A 2020 collaboration with the Denver Art Museum, Norman Rockwell Museum, and creatives from all over the West Coast. It was a reflection on the Norman Rockwell exhibit “Imagining Freedom,” and an inquiry into what freedom means in 2020. This event was a year in the making and had many components.
I conducted a panel with scholars, activists and art leaders to talk about building equity and also give the history of constitutional law and policing in the United States. It had a creative story swap called “The Other” where people from around the world shared a story where their worldview was changed, and we took those anonymous stories and swapped them between global participants. The event also had an improvisational spoken word/freestyle component that I do called Verses for Humanity, where people give various themes and topics on their mind and I collaborate with a pianist and turn them into rhymes and verses in real time.
There was also visual art, a gallery tour, a culinary cultural presentation, and then an ending with a performance from my a cappella group The Storytellers. One thing that we are known for is our ability to musically improvise. At the end, we had people share how the event affected them, and we turned it into a song in real time which I also added some rhymes into, and that is the selection of the video. This event represents my desire to deconstruct global issues from various mediums and to add context and nuance to our world. This is what I do in a lot of my work and why the event was aptly themed Re:Viewing.