Damon Locks: We Are Our People / Listen to This: March 23 - May 3, 2025

Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago where he received his BFA in fine arts. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He is a 2025 recipient of the Creative Capital Award. In 2017 he became a Soros Justice Media Fellow. He received the Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts in 2015. In 2019, he became a 3Arts Awardee. 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 teaches Improvisation in the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As well as being a solo musician, Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals.

 

Damon Locks: I think the answer to that stems back to my childhood when I saw the large impact of punk music. The Sex Pistols, for example, and the huge public outcry against their music, showed me how music could have a political impact. Or groups on the Two Tone label, like The Specials, were addressing and combating a racist notions in England at that time and had a very political stance. Public Enemy was similar. They were having a political conversation with their art.  They were addressing political issues with their work and the public was responding to that work. The work created something that made the public do more than just dance and people engaged with political issues as a part of the work.I found it super intriguing that these groups were using their popularity to spread a political message. I was also interested early on in things that weren’t considered art. I was very interested in graffiti, and comic books, and of course both were artistic things, but they weren’t categorized as such. But those things were accessible to everyone and I really enjoyed that.

 

All these groups were famous, and this allowed me to know who they were. But when I started to find out more about people Like Sun Ra or the The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians here in Chicago and other Black organizations across the country that weren’t famous but were doing stuff in community and making work that kind of served the community or addressed the community issues within their work. That became appealing to me. So it fed into that same kind of thought process, but not in like kind of a pop culture way.

 

I think in my wildest dreams I’ve always wanted to have engagement with people through my art. It never seemed all that satisfying to know that there’s a piece of art just hanging on a wall. I wanted to figure out some way of having a more connected experience through my work. So I think that that’s part of my need to work in more than just one medium. I want to have a conversation. 

 

When I started really focusing on making art, around 2007, I decided that I was interested in this idea of community and making work that connected to community. And I was very interested in making work that would speak to Black people. I wanted Black people to be my subject matter, and as I developed that, I was interested in figuring out ways of making that work accessible to the Black community. And what does that look like if you’re working in the art world? Can you make art galleries accessible? Can you make work, music, as accessible? What were the tools of that? --from Heather Radke's interview with Damon Locks in The Believer