Lift

Co-presented by the Yale University Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) Sound Art Series and Artspace New Haven

LIFT (Listening Skies) is a music and video work. It is a meditation on both the history of aerial photography and the one hundred year old song often called the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing. In this work Mendi + Keith were particularly inspired by the aerial images captured by the African-American engineer Shelby Jacobs’ camera system aboard Apollo 6 spacecraft in 1968 and the celestial references found in the melody and text composed by brothers J. Rosamond Johnson and James Weldon Johnson. The Johnson brothers originally wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing for school children. Early in his life Jacobs could have been one of these school children whose horizon was literally expanded by this song.

In this work Mendi and Keith use cameras mounted to balloons and drones to capture images from the sky and merge those with original music and text inspired by this great secular hymn.

This will be a virtual event and is free and open to all. Please register here.