After a yearlong wait, artist and outlier Marc Bamuthi Joseph visits Groton

On the evening of its first day back from March break, the Groton School student body shuffled into the Campbell Performing Arts Center for the spring Circle Talk. Waiting for them was artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph, who explained from the start that they had every right to be suspicious. 

 

“I think it’s within your rights to be suspicious of anybody your institution would bring to talk to you,” he said. “In balance with that suspicion, I invite you into the shared space of the outlier.”  

 

Mr. Joseph is a multi-platform performer who’s as comfortable delivering spoken-word poetry as he is writing opera. He’s a social activist who is dedicated to sharing about Black art and anti-racism. He’s a 2017 TED Global Fellow, an inaugural recipient of the Guggenheim Social Practice initiative, and an honoree of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship. And on top of all this, he still finds time to serve as vice president and artistic director of Social Impact at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.

 

Originally scheduled to appear on campus in April 2022, Mr. Joseph’s visit was shifted to a virtual talk out of COVID-related precautions. Head of the Speakers Committee Tommy Lamont said she and committee member Laurie Sales agreed his message would be more effective in person, so Mr. Joseph was invited back to the CPAC stage for something more intimate. 

 

It was worth the wait. 

 

In a wide-ranging discussion that bounced between frank talk and masterfully phrased rhymes, Mr. Joseph explored his twin themes—the potential for a transformative future and the currencies of redemption—by weaving current events with poetry and philosophy. 

On Breonna Taylor: “Give us this day a shot a peace/A day we don’t have to function knowing the night before a young woman was state-sanctioned murdered in her sleep.”

 

On the recent controversy in Florida over Michelangelo's David: “We are in a potent moment of explosively distorted histories, of cultural erasure.”

 

On watching the January 6 Capitol insurrection from his tenth floor apartment in Washington: “That day I watched and paced my space like an animal./That day I watched the lie become its own malignant mass of class anger./In fact, a lie became an animal.” 

 

On the long-term impact of COVID, Mr. Joseph pointed to his 21-year-old son, a member of the high school Class of 2020, who came back from school on a Wednesday and never went back:

“Where is the space to heal from that? The public health is in place but the public healing is not. My question is: How is art an intervention and creation of space for public healing? Can it be? And are we all just going to live in a future where we ignore the time where 7 billion of us experienced a trauma at once?” 

While admitting that his idea of a transformative future—as opposed to other options, such as growth, collapse, or constraint—was the hardest to envision, Mr. Joseph called on students to embrace the work needed to deliver the world they deserve.

“I wish for you an equitable country that’s worth the value of your creative genius,” he said. “But you will not inherit that country, and there will be nothing that brings it into being more swiftly than your own example.

 

“The national debt is measured in dollars, but the truth is we have an inspiration debt that’s far worse,” Mr. Joseph continued. “Your contribution to the elimination of that debt is to join the legion of us: outsiders, outliers who inspire others for a living. Love alone will not pay the bills, but the art that you love generates public healing. The art that we love enables creative capacity in others. The art that we love, that we’re challenged by, that we hate enough to talk about incessantly, the art that we make inspires others. That is a redemptive currency. Inspiration is the primary currency that can actually pay for a transformative future. And we outliers are rich with that stuff.”

As the program drew to a close, Mr. Joseph took some questions from students. One asked if he ever doubted his impact as an artist. 

“Yes,” Mr. Joseph explained, “but I believe in the adjacent possible. At the moment of the Big Bang, every element that was necessary to come together and construct the Empire State Building was there. But you couldn’t go from the Big Bang to the Empire State Building. You had to have water, and newts, and other stuff. 

“No poem I write is going to end the patriarchy, or eradicate white supremacy, or abolish heterosexism. But somebody in here is a world changer. And somebody will take the idea of public healing or hear a particular couplet and that will contribute to that person’s overall algorithm around world changing. The thing that you have to have confidence in is that, even when you doubt yourself, we all impact each other, even in small ways.”