ARTSblog

2011 Contest Entry: "Finding Solace in Birmingham," Kelly Moore, Sequoyah High School, Grade 12, 16" x 18" charcoal/pastels

Fifty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream for America “where people would be judged by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin, where little black boys and black girls would be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

Fifty years later, America is no doubt a very different nation than it was in 1963, especially concerning the rights of African-Americans and racial integration. Yet the widening disparity of wealth and deepening social tensions that precipitated the March on Washington are as topical today as they were in the sixties. The underlying conflicts and tensions that erupted in the sixties—conflicts and tensions that had been festering since the founding of our country—remain unresolved.

Inspired by the Declaration of Independence and forged by the Black experience in America, the modern civil rights movement was a philosophy of life designed to address these inconsistencies in American democracy. It was a philosophy of humility and hope, of pragmatism and idealism, and of individualism and the “Beloved Community,” indeed a second American revolution, that aspired to integrate the divided soul of the nation and inaugurate a new era of progress and possibility.

Fifty years later, as the nation and the world face daunting social, political, and environmental challenges that demand a “new” paradigm, a new vision, for how we can relate to each other as human beings, the timing could not be better to revisit “The Dream Speech” and the wisdom of the civil rights movement.

THE DREAM@50 is a tribute series in 2012–13 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Including a student art contest (K–12), a world music/dance festival, and video PSAs, THE DREAM@50 is a celebration of creative collaboration in both the civil rights movement and the arts as the foundation for a new paradigm in how we can live together. The goal of THE DREAM@50 Art Contest is to embrace the arts as a vehicle for bringing this history alive for students today in order to clarify the lessons of the past and to empower our students with the tools to make a difference and make the dream a reality. Read the rest of this entry »

Delali Ayivor

At age fifteen, I made the decision, completely of my own accord, to move halfway across the world from my home in Accra, Ghana to Interlochen, Michigan so that I could attend boarding school and learn to be a writer.

Yet, still, three years down the line, I had to be told that I was a poet. Sure, I knew that I wrote poems, I even knew that some of them were pretty good, but to me, a poet was something larger than that, something otherworldly and infinitely wise that I could only ever hope to become after years of turmoil, some kind of Southeast Asian religious epiphany, at least one mutually-abusive romantic relationship, and lots of hard drinking.

But when I was named a YoungArts finalist in poetry and then, later that same year, a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts in poetry, reality intruded, and I was forced to give up my romanticism in favor of convenience.

Recently, after a performance with YoungArts in Los Angeles, in which I performed one of a series of poems that revolved around black women and the complex relationship we have with our hair, I was introduced to someone as a spoken word poet.

While they enthused about the authenticity of my poem and my presence on stage, I was struck completely dumb. “Hold on,” I thought. “I just barely reconciled myself with being a Jr. Deputy Poet in Training. How did I become a spoken word artist? Can you even become a spoken word artist without trying?” And then of course, came the perennial paranoid knee-jerk reaction familiar to many “Is this only happening to me because I’m Black?” Read the rest of this entry »