Singing the Legacy of Sekou Sundiata: The America Project

Intermedia Arts is proud to have been the first national host site for The America Project: Singing the Legacy of Sekou Sundiata, a series of community events including Art Treats lunches, citizenship dinners, a film screening, potluck dinner and community sing, all designed to inspire and ignite our passionate ideals around citizenry, civic work, and active engagement in civic life. Together we use art, music, conversation and laughter to discuss what it means to be an American today, and to dream about what it could mean in the future.

The culmination of our celebration was on the evening of Saturday, October 24^th, when we invited our community to join us for our very first Potluck Dinner and Community Sing from 6-10PM. This was an evening of food, song, celebration and dialogue around critical citizenship, creativity and civic dialogue.

The America Project celebrates and continues the work of poet, musician, teacher, theater and spoken word artist Sekou Sundiata,  who dreamed of creating public rituals around our American "holy days" and civic life. In 2009, MAPP International selected Intermedia Arts to be the first organization in the country to host a public gathering of The America Project since Sundiata's passing in 2007. Intermedia Arts brings 37 years of experience using art and dialogue as a catalyst for community change and bringing underrepresented voices and stories to the forefront.  

Living in the aftermath of 9/11, I feel an urgent and renewed engagement with what it means to be an American. But that engagement is a troubling one because of a longstanding estrangement between American civic ideals and American civic practice. This project is my response to this reality. I take it as a civic responsibility to think about these things out loud, in the ritualized form of theater and public dialogue.

—Sekou Sundiata 

This event is supported by the America Project Working Group with funds contributed by The Ford Foundation and The Nathan Cummings Foundation, and is presented in collaboration with the Walker Art Center. The America Project Working Group is a consortium dedicated to sustaining arts-based and artist-driven public explorations of the meaning of engaged citizenship in the United States today. The America Project emerged from the creative work of the late artist, poet and educator Sekou Sundiata as a shared contemplation of America's national identity, its power in the world and its guiding mythologies.