Where do you think the space is going?
I think that the culture workers have to go to work presenting this to the masses so that they understand and present this new language in a way that allows people to see themselves and open up their imagination around what they can do and build their legacy.
Where did the idea come from for POD? What is it and why is it important?
Pieces Of a Dream is a collaboration between 21 artists to save a man’s life. It is a conversation around the inhumanity of the death penalty, the inhumanity solitary confinement, and the overarching inhumanity of racism that finds people who aren’t guilty on death trow. Death row is a tool of the prison industrial complex to maintain a sense of control over Black bodies.
He has little under 900 days to live according to the state of Ohio. His name is Keith LaMar and he is scheduled to be executed November 16, 2023. He has been on death row for 26 years and incarcerated for 28 years. He initially went into jail for selling drugs. He got a job as protection and was shot at and shot back. He did his time for that crime but in 1993 there was a riot in the Lucasville prison and 8 inmates were killed and a guard. Two inmates incriminated and lied about his involvement and that’s how his sentence became a death sentence.
How did you get connected with Keith?
I got connected through Brian Jackson who was the catalyst of the Pieces Of a Dream. He was the musical partner and brother of Gil Scott Heron. You know Gil’s work. This is the 50th anniversary of Pieces of a Man and he’s the one that told me about Keith Lamar and we invited Keith to be one of the poets and the more i started to understand about his story, i realized that his story was in fact, the story of pieces of a dream and reflective of Gil and Brian’s work. But his story became the beacon.
Talk about the artists in the show and the theme
Pieces of a Dream is 10 pieces and each piece is a collaboration between Brian Jackson, a poet and an NFT artist. The poets are award winning poets that I’ve known all my life. They include Saul Williams, Latash Diggs, Lisa .. Peterson and others. Mike Ladd took the place of Craig Mumms who recently passed. He is one of my oldest and dearest friends and came up together making spoken word in the early 90’s. He had committed to the project and we lost him 2 days later. So I approached Mike to take Craig’s place. So Piece #4 is a collaboration between Mike and Jenni West who is Craig’s Life partner. Jenni has a portrait of Mumns while he was asleep and we took that painting and added some subtle movements to it and then Mike did a poem to that. That piece, for thos ewho know Mumms, thats our memory of him. Ursula Rucker is another one that’s in the show that should be mentioned.
What is experience like for those reading this?
Pieces Of A Dream is a meditation. Though you can buy them individually, all 10 pieces represent 3 movement; . Love, Farewell and Life. It’s a meditation on how we try to achieve in our dreams, and live and say goodby to our dreams and how the dreams can live on beyond us. If someone buys one dream they sit in the meditation of the artist’s dream and meditation as well.
I think when the pieces are sold I want to create 3 motifs to sell and allow people to remix them and bring in their inputs that they can have ownership over. I am also creating the experience in pieces of a dream in the metaverse with the help if NiftyKlit. I want to bring people into the experience of solitary and TIME and the injustices of the death penalty but moving towards the dream of freedom and wanting to find one’s freedom after being caught up in the system. When we talk about the injustices in the criminal justice system, I think we should look beyond that and towards what freedom means as well.
POD is dreaming of ways to circumvent the situations that make people make bad decisions and to how much time does one do to make up for a crime. And then there’s the dream of who are we to take another person’s life? So the question is how much of our lives as a society do we lose when we decide to take someone else’s.
What is the ultimate goal for the program and show?
The two goals are to raise money for representation for Keith. He needs better legal representation to get him out of the jam he is in and to spread the word about his story. Even those who buy the pieces I hope it’s not just a matter of simply displaying them but I hope that they go and tell the story of this man when people ask them about the art. The collector becomes an artivist or collectivist if you will. I believe that in this blockchain world, that the buck doesn’t stop with the collector. Both the artist and collector increase the value of the work when they continue to tell the story.
Tell us about the strategy behind the release for the show.
I have been experimenting with different strategies. I dont think theres any thats automatically going to work. This is a time of experimentation and so you need to try different things. At first I was going to release 26 versions of each piece that represented each year Keith has been in prison. But when it came down to it I decided to release POD in PIECES. Since I was trying to tell a story, I decided to not release it all at the same time but to align it with the way we read, a chapter at a time.
We as humans need stories to understand the world around us, and sometimes that story comes in breadcrumbs. So, I’m trying to allow the pieces to speak for themselves. So every week we are releasing a few pieces of the dream so people can see how they are all collected. This will be the second week with next week being the final piece.
So how do you describe a smart contract to someone who isn’t in the space? You have all these artists working on pieces together? How did you break down what a smart contact is to them?
A smart contract for me is the original 40 acres that were denied to our ancestors. Those 40 acres were meant to be the seed for us and our descendants to find wealth and sustainability in this country that has done us horribly wrong. A smart contract is a do-over. It says here’s my 40 acres. I decide who steps on my land, who helps to build my land, and what is grown on my land. I should be able to pass it down to my kids and grandkids and so on. So this smart contract is a time capsule of your work, your art, your journey as an artist and human being. That time capsule increases in value as you go through life and it all on the block chain. It delivers on what was promised and this is why i encourage artists to get their own contract otherwise, they are just sharecroppers.
What do you want to leave our readers and visitors to the show with?
I want to invite more people of color into this space not just to create or shape the culture but to be able to support black artists because black artists are supported by those who can look at their art without explanation. There’s a freedom in knowing that you can create art because there is a collectors space that can see all of you in your art. That is my vision for this whole ecosystem is to invite more collectors who aren’t white, male and rich into the space so we can have more stories.
Follow Hanifah on Twitter and IG. You can view the Pieces of A Dream collection on NiftyKit.
