Blues U : BX
Blues U is a queer/feminist, black and indigenous improvisational platform for a 21st century Blues University syllabus that is completely free to the public.
Currently, Blues U is a live radio show broadcast on radiocoyote.org and 90.1FM in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, OK. At the invitation of Atomic Culture, this project first aired on August 15, 2021 and continues bi-monthly through the present. With the support of the Social Practice Grant, Blues U brings its multi-media curriculum live to audiences in the Bronx to create cross-cultural conversations between local, regional and national artists, cultural organizers, educators, and community members.
Blues U: BX will include collaborations with land stewards, housing organizers, and libraries. Main themes for upcoming shows in Winter/Spring 2024 gravitate around questions of Black and Indigenous land reclamation, reparations, healing our relationship to land and recognizing humans as part of our ecology. As a resident of Highbridge, I will connect with housing organizers at CASA Power; community gardens like La Isla, La Finca del Sur, and Brook Park; and community and cultural centers like New Settlement, BronxWorks, Longwood Art Gallery, BAAD!, the Point, and the Bronx Documentary Center as potential partners.
Blues U as a ‘core curriculum’ includes: music, storytelling, conversations, commentary, oral histories, and interviews about art, culture, politics, organizing, and aesthetics; skill-shares and workshops; responsive playlists/DJ sets; and sound pieces created specifically for these sessions. As a pedagogical and cultural project, Blues U draws inspiration from Freedom Schools, Freedom University, Oakland Community Schools, Gallery of the Streets, Recess/Assembly, The Black School, the Highlander Center, and INCITE! Blues U expands and explores vibrant aesthetic and political forms of expression.
In the radio show I share a deep, improvised study into the Blues as a technology of resistance and resilience of a distinct Black and Indigenous working class cultural and political voice. It’s a forum for conversations with others whose research, art, and practices extend Blues ways of listening, knowing and doing. Each guest is asked:
- If the Blues is a technology of resistance, what does that look, sound and feel like today? Where should we look and listen for it?
- How do we read and decode it?
- What does it sound like to you?
- Who are your people and where are your places?
- How will we be free?
