Beautiful Places / Freedom Spaces

Beautiful Places/Freedom Spaces combines live music, spoken word, and visual arts to focus on resilience and healing from racialized environmental injustice. This project expands on a 2018 jam session series developed by Ellis and held at community-led, revitalized green spaces in Detroit and, Highland Park, and the other neighborhoods. Like the original series, Beautiful Places/Freedom Spaces uplifts the vital spirit of places that suffered from sustained disinvestment in their people and communal bonds. Ellis’s art is a powerful form of therapy that encourages audiences to move past the many intersectional traumas stemming from racialized disparities in access and outcomes.

Coming together at Jakobi Ra Park in Avalon Village, participants develop the personal and communal skills to combat water and food insecurity through practical, hands-on demonstrations. Black and Brown communities in Detroit disproportionately bear the brunt of harmful environmental policies—water shutoffs, lack of access to clean water, pollution, and industrial waste. The demonstrations include survival techniques like water collection and filtration, gardening, and using solar energy to power small devices.

Ellis’s work uses music and spoken word as a means of healing, therapy and renewal aligned with the spaces and work of partner organization Avalon Village. Beautiful Places/Freedom Spaces looks at our society’s ills through the lens of live music and asks us to consider what it means to thrive in the present and into the near future.

Date: September 21, 2019
Partner: Jakobi Ra Park
Location: 24 Avalon St, Highland Park, MI 48203
Coordinates: 42.40008, -83.09457

About the Artist

Aisha Ellis, hailing from Detroit, is a drummer, percussionist, and more. As of 2017, she is the recording and performing drummer for international recording artist Les Nubians and Mahogany Jones. She has been the co-drummer and recently the percussionist for Jessica Care Moore’s “Black Women Rock” for the past several years. She is affectionately known as Drumlova or Time Keepa and was the drummer for the Detroit based hip-hop band YiN, which was the offspring of all female band Lola Valley. For the past three years, she has been the drummer for Mollywop, a Detroit-based multi-genre band.