Walker Art Center Presents
DAMON LOCKS'S BLACK MONUMENT ENSEMBLE
Saturday, April 20, 2024
8:00 pm
McGuire Theater
Damon Locks's Black Monument Ensemble
Damon Locks — Vocals and Sampler
Dana Hall — Drums
Arif Smith — Percussions
Angel Bat Dawid — Clarinet
BSA Gold — Flute
Monique Golding — Vocals
Tramaine Parker — Vocals
Eric Tre’von — Vocals
Aaliyah Christina — Dancer
The performance runs approximately 90 minutes without intermission.
Please join us at Walker's Cityview Bar for a reception with the artists immediately following the performance.
Accessibility Notes
For more information about accessibility at the Walker, visit our Access page.
Program Note
Originally conceived as a medium for Chicago-based multimedia artist/educator Damon Locks’s sample-based sound collage work, Black Monument Ensemble (BME) has evolved from a solo mission into a vibrant collective of artists, musicians, singers, and dancers making work with common goals of joy, compassion, and intention. Galvanized by Locks’s conceptualizing, poeticizing, and guiding vision, the contributors represent the richness and diversity of Black artistic excellence in Chicago. Together they weave unique perspectives and experiences to uplifting, anthemic, and highly animated musical performance.
The inception of Black Monument Ensemble came about after Damon’s first semester teaching art inside Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security men’s prison about an hour outside of Chicago in 2014. Seeing the “justice system” at work at close range at the same time experiencing the public deaths of people like Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and many others caused him to rethink his art and music practice. To process all of this information about where we stand in terms of race relations in the U.S. he turned to sound. The first iteration of this processing formed the building blocks of what Black Monument was to become. It was a solo performance (for the most part, save for one song which featured the percussionist Damien Thompson) in 2015 where archival recordings were juxtaposed with beds of sound built by samples and other electronics.
Through this deep dive into archival materials: poetry, speeches, storytelling, interviews, documentaries, a method of building sonic essays came about. The desire to build upon that was a natural impulse. He began working alongside dancers with the Chicago Westside company, Move Me Soul and slowly put together a group of 5 singers and a percussionist to put on the first unnamed performance of the group. That first performance took place in his visual art studio at Hyde Park Art Center in 2017.
From then on the project continued to grow performing at such places as Garfield Park Conservatory, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Cultural Center, and Millennium Park. The group has been lucky enough to travel to London, Paris, Utrecht, and last fall they performed in São Paulo, Brazil.
Two albums and a pandemic later, Black Monument is on the brink of recording their third album. They are making plans to perform at Stateville Correctional Center where it all began (conceptually). For this show, Black Monument Ensemble will bring to the Walker stage a collection of the songs that got them to where they are today. The concern and the frustration, as well as the joy and jubilation will all be present as they perform their journey from first album (Where Future Unfolds) to second album (NOW), to Beyond (a song for the new record).
BME is a multi-generational collective whose members range from 13- 55 years old.
Learn More
Recognizing their shared musical histories, we asked Damon Locks and Tomeka Reid—who performed at the Walker with her Stringtet earlier this spring—to interview each other for the Walker Reader. What ensued was a conversation about how collaboration, community, and life experience continually informs and reforms their music. In the following excerpt, Locks explains his views on the worldbuilding potential of sound:
I don’t know if I really thought about being a musician. I used to love superheroes. I was super interested in superheroes, as well as West Side Story and Jesus Christ Superstar. That I really connected with. People were creating these narratives and expressing them through music. I always liked music, but when I found punk, those musicians looked like superheroes to me.
If you look at a poster of the Sex Pistols or The Clash or someone like that, it looked like people dressed up as superheroes in real life. That is what attracted me to music to begin with. I think I was an artist who wanted to live in this other world, so I created bands where I could talk about ideas and weave them through with sound. I spent many years as a vocalist, but part of my job was also to frame the visuals—frame out the ideas that we were talking about. I was more of this director and front person, but I think it’s been in the last 15 years where I’ve been asking myself, “What is sound and what do you want to say with sound?”
When I stepped away from my band Eternals and started doing solo electronics, as well as Black Monument Ensemble, is when I was looking at the arc of a creation in a larger way. I had to come up with the frameworks for all of them. Some of it had to do with fashion. Some of it had to do with politics. Some of it had to do with wanting to dance. Some of it wanted to do with all these other aspects. These days I keep coming back to: What does sound do for people? How can you communicate ideas? What can it do to open up people’s minds? All those things are playing in my head.
Read the full interview here: It Makes Us Who We Are: Tomeka Reid and Damon Locks on Musical Improvisation, from Jazz to Punk Rock and Beyond (walkerart.org)
Artist Bios
DAMON LOCKS is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He spent 4 years as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy High School. He currently teaches Improvisation in the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, drummer DANA HALL has been an important musician on the international music scene since 1992. After completing his education in aerospace engineering at Iowa State University, he received his Bachelor of Music degree from William Paterson College in Wayne, New Jersey and, in 1999, his Masters degree in composition and arranging from DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.Dana Hall became interim dean of the School of Music in November 2022. A professor in the school, he joined DePaul in 2012 and has served as the director of jazz studies since 2014.
ARIF SMITH is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. His performance- and video-based work centers on diasporic citizenship and African-rooted performance practices, exploring notions of blackness, co-presence, and marronage. Smith was a 2017-18 Artist-in-Residence at University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture. Currently, he is a Program Manager at Old Town School of Folk Music and Research Associate at the Field Museum. Smith is also a member of Bomba con Buya, Iré Elese Abure, and Black Monument Ensemble.
ANGEL BAT DAWID is a Black American Composer, Improviser, Clarinetist, Pianist, Vocalist, Educator and DJ. In 2019 she released her debut album The Oracle with Chicago label International Anthem Recording Co.. Recorded using only her cell phone in various locations, the album received wide-spread critical-acclaim with Pitchfork declaring it, “a vibrant, spiritual, free-jazz document of black life as it stands today.” She is the bandleader of Sistazz of tha Nitty Gritty and That Brothahood.
BSA GOLD is a producer and flutist from Washington, DC. Inspired by Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Sade, and the traditional sounds of her Ethiopian ancestry, she experiments with synths and electronic grooves, exploring the possibilities for composition as a producer and songwriter. BSA Gold has performed for MC Lyte's "Women in Hip-Hop" at The Kennedy Center, SummerStage NYC, etc. and more recently opened for John Carroll Kirby and Son's of Kemet’s Theon Cross. BSA Gold is a 2020 recipient of Harlem Stage's Water Works Grant as a part of Long Arms. She has also curated music and performing arts programming across various spaces in Chicago, NYC, and Washington, DC.
Born in Ruston, Louisiana and raised across Louisiana, Maryland, and Texas, AALIYAH CHRISTINA creates and supports performance work as an administrator, curator, movement artist, and writer. She makes dances and writes critical responses about Chicago performance, relationship/power dynamics, mental health, and Blackness as a resident on the South side of Chicago. Since 2015, she has collaborated with other Chicago artists like Keyierra Collins, Darling Squire, Wisdom Baty, Ayako Kato, and Dorian Sylvain to name a few. Aaliyah has received the 2021 3Arts Make-A-Wave grant, the Illinois Arts Council Agency 2023 Artist Fellowship Finalist Award, 2024 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist Award, and the 2023-2024 Chicago Cultural Center Dance Studio Residency. She created PRAISE MOTHER (2020-present), a dance theater project highlighting relationships between Black matriarchs and their kin through their mental health journeys.
TRAMAINE S. PARKER began singing at the age of 4 in the angelic choir at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Chicago. Since then she has sang for S the Chicago Children’s Choir, John Work Chorale,Vocality, Black Monument Ensemble, Lakeside Singers, Chicago Freedom Singers featuring Kathleen Battle, and most recently is a singer for Chance the Rapper.She has sung in distinguished venues like Ravinia, Carnegie Hall and Riverside Church New York; and has performed in numerous countries including Brazil, Amsterdam, Portugal, Sweden, Ghana and Denmark. In addition to performing,Tramaine is dedicated to the social welfare if children and works for the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services as a Child Welfare Specialist at the SCR unit (Child Abuse Hotline) in Chicago.
MONIQUE GOLDING began singing before the age of five at home and at her mother’s church. Her vocal style is influenced by Gospel, Jazz, R&B and Spiritual genres. She began pursuing music professionally in 2017 when she arrived to Chicago, IL. She began performing with Damon Locks and Black Monument Ensemble in 2018. She is a member of Angel Bat Dawid’s Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty with whom she has performed at various venues domestically and internationally. When not performing, Monique works as a full-time consultant and is raising two daughters, one of which is also a member of the Black Monument Ensemble.
Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, ERIC TRE'VON joined the BME family in 2018. Whether it is singing, dancing, composing or producing-the importance of amplifying the truth, and affirming lived experiences is an artistic obligation for Eric. BME holds a special place in Eric's heart, they are family that gives language, space and somewhere to land safely. Eric attributes becoming a more informed and principled artist to the BME family and will continue to be a vessel of sound and truth for this family and the people of the world.
Living Land Acknowledgement
The McGuire Theater and Walker Art Center are located on the contemporary, traditional, and ancestral homelands of the Dakota people. Situated near Bde Maka Ska and Wíta Tópa Bde, or Lake of the Isles, on what was once an expanse of marshland and meadow, this site holds meaning for Dakota, Ojibwe, and Indigenous people from other Native nations, who still live in the community today.
We acknowledge the discrimination and violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in Minnesota and the Americas, including forced removal from ancestral lands, the deliberate destruction of communities and culture, deceptive treaties, war, and genocide. We recognize that, as a museum in the United States, we have a colonial history and are beneficiaries of this land and its resources. We acknowledge the history of Native displacement that allowed for the founding of the Walker. By remembering this dark past, we recognize its continuing harm in the present and resolve to work toward reconciliation, systemic change, and healing in support of Dakota people and the land itself.
We honor Native people and their relatives, past, present, and future. As a cultural organization, the Walker works toward building relationships with Native communities through artistic and educational programs, curatorial and community partnerships, and the presentation of new work.
Walker Art Center Acknowledgments
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To learn more about upcoming performances, visit 2023/24 Walker Performing Arts Season.
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