Artists & Projects Directory

• Africa Consortium
• Dan Hurlin
• David Zambrano
• Dean Moss
• Faustin Linyekula
• Ivana Müller
• Los Muñequitos
• Marc Bamuthi Joseph
• Nora Chipaumire
• Ralph Lemon
• Stories Left to Tell
• The America Project
• Voices of Strength
• Yasuko Yokoshi

Marc Bamuthi Joseph/The Living Word Project

Let me tell you about Georgia red clay
Iron oxide based
Betrays centuries of blacktop in regress
A clear indication of the universe's fetish for fingerpaint
Beneath your fingers it melts like warm of a woman in the heat of undress
Burnt dreams and soft yams red
Santana black magic sienna
Hendrix hallucination red
So different from the gumbo dark delta soil
Georgia's clay is the earth I first honored

Muddy water turned firm
And blushing...

I'm a city kid
In Atlanta I learned land
My sister calls them my shepherd years
Georgia red clay
Black people deep south
A young man, I was green...

. . . 

In the end
The earth has her justice
What will we do when there's nothing left to eat but money and regret
And the fungus and the stench of a bitter future black bagging us in the night for
The right to breathe clean air?

Maybe instead of rain they're begging the skies to release Mumia
Praying justice roll down like thunder
Apocalypse in the midst in the misting
In the hunger

Deliver us
Let faith settle under our feet secure in its foundation like red clay
Soft in its surrender like the earth under rain
Under god
Indivisible

A black shepherd gone green
Collecting poems as prayers my country tis of thee
I sing
Cardinal red sin
Collecting voices like Beethoven notes
Like Ellison prose
Like lost sheep
Like lives
Like minds
Like dreams
Curious about the end of days
Beholden to the sacred ground
Drawn up like blooms blossoming from the thirsty red clay
Begging god for a change in the weather