INSTANT KARMA
Damon Locks – Black Monument Ensemble
Former Chicago punk melding spiritual jazz with gospel and electronica to address the times
KRISTIE KAHNS; DARIS JASPER
A VISUAL artist, singer, actor and educator, Damon Locks is a modern renaissance man. However, his most recent project – the uplifting and polemical gospel/jazz group Black Monument Ensemble – came into being when one strand of his artistic practice no longer felt like the apposite tool to help transcend the state of the world. “There was a time period when there were a series of what seemed to be regular deaths of black people on the internet,” Locks begins. “That’s still going on. I’d started teaching art in a maximum security prison here in Chicago, working with incarcerated artists. Then someone else would get murdered. I was struggling with how to be an artist as it was hard to incorporate nice mark-making into this difficult world.”