COTTON
A RETROSPECTIVE
On Tuesday February 28th, Washington Performing Arts invited several of WBL’s outstanding youth artists to the John F. Kennedy Center to witness an incredible multimedia performance that reached out into the crowd using multiple artistic genres: the powerful photography of John Dowell, the soaring opera vocals of Denyce Graves and the moving words of Nikki Giovannni, Alora Young & others.
For the next hour & a half, our students watched the story of
America - our inhumanity, our resilience, & our spirit through expression. Beautifully provocative Imagery turned into heart-wrenching words which then morphed into glorious song - all surrounding these soft, bright, prickly explosions reaching up from the soil....at the shows opening, it was announced that the youth poets of Words Beats & Life will be giving a similar presentation -
Below is the result of that work.
Ten exceptional youth poets came together, both in person and virtually, to process, discuss & create art that not only addresses the unspoken, but in some cases, reconciles our relatively comfortable place in the world today with an American history that too often clouds over what was done to it’s most vulnerable - yet powerful - people. We visited a local plantation and learned the stories of resilience exhibited by the enslaved. We learned their names. We touched the soil that they did. We became active participants in a struggle that is not yet over, and one that continues in these pages. We invite you to sit with each piece, absorb the visuals and open yourselves to the spirit of the COTTON Retrospective.
FEATURED POETS
