Blues People has always meant a great deal to me. It was a dramatic self-confirmation, as a personal intellectual and artistic “presence,” but also as the expression of a set of ideas and measures that I have carried with me for many years. Most, even until today. –Amiri Baraka
Inspired by the 60th anniversary of the acclaimed book Blues People: Negro Music in White America by writer, poet, and political activist Leroi Jones, who later renamed himself Amiri Baraka, visual artists – Derrick Adams, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Adebunmi Gbadebo, Cesar Melgar, and Accra Shepp – have reimagined a pivotal work of theirs and created five newly commissioned art installations in Express Newark that explore what it means to be “Blues People” in the twenty-first century.
