- Hello everybody, I'm Satori Shakoor.

Welcome to "Detroit Performs: Live from Marygrove," where Detroit's talented artists take the stage and share insights into their performances.

This episode is curated by mixed media artists, Ackeem Salmon.

He's gonna share with us his harp skills, spoken word performance, and some live painting.

It's going to be a fun one up ahead on "Detroit Performs: Live from Marygrove."

- [Announcer] Funding for "Detroit Performs" is provided by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, Gregory Haynes and Richard Sonenklar, the Kresge Foundation, the A, Paul and Carol C. Schaap Foundation, the Michigan Arts & Culture Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) (transition whooshing) - Hey everybody.

I'm sitting here with Ackeem Salmon, curator of tonight's episode and performer.

Hi Ackeem.

- Hello.

- So what would you describe your art as?

You do a lot of things, right?

- Yes.

- You paint, you perform, so you're just gifted (chuckles).

- Thank you.

In essence, I'm a multidisciplinary artist, so I would say I use my art as a tool in a way to talk about just my own human experience, looking at memory.

So for painting, I look at it as a way of making physical artifacts as a way that I can see what my hand is able to store a form of data.

And then through music and performance, I'm able to see this like ephemeral quality.

Like what is like that fleeting moment when you hear a sound being made, and that nervous moment in your body that you respond to it.

So a lot of what I do through multidisciplinary is looking at both responses to time.

- Now what are you performing for us this evening?

- So this evening I'm gonna be performing, I'm gonna say like blues on harp.

One of the things that has been a wonderful kind of just adventure has been seeing what the harp is able to do naturally.

- Now, is that an original piece?

- Yeah, you know?

- Okay.

- And I think that's the nice part.

It's like composing has been nice where I was able to do that on the violin, and I'm able to hear it, but on the harp, there's a wonderful improvisational nature within it.

So it's like I'm able to build a framework over a composition or a piece, but because of what the harp can do, there is just a natural ability to just improvise.

So even today what I'm gonna be doing is improvise, but also it builds a framework off an actual piece.

- And what will you be doing today besides the blues harp?

- The other one that I will be doing, I think it's gonna be in the kind of general, passionate harp music.

So it's gonna be a lot more soulful, and you know, the idea of how do you bring that like passion, and drama, and flair.

So that's gonna be one, and that one is more of structured, and I think that's also the interesting dynamic.

Blues is like naturally you want to improvise and you want to feel in it.

So the other one that I'm gonna be doing, it's a lot more structured.

- And you're also doing live painting and spoken word?

- Yes, I'm also gonna be doing that as well.

And the nice part about it, and when I mentioned being multidisciplinary, it's an interdisciplinary aspect of it because one doesn't exist without the other.

So even, for instance, one of the spoken words that I'm gonna be talking about is a painting that's on stage.

Actually both the poems, one of them is distinctly made from an artwork, and a lot of the things that I'm able to do, so even when it comes back to my identity, I would say, I'm a writer, so writing and idea of multidisciplinary, it's basically being able to weave these intricate stories through these varied mediums and looking at poetry as a way of summarizing complex human form and human thoughts.

The way that music, music expression, composition, you're basically organizing data, organizing entropy, the chaos that exists, into a way that we can all relate.

And the idea of painting, it's like, here am I going to make this physical artifact that might live or last longer than I live.

So I think these are some of the moments that I'm expressing in that duality between all of these different mediums.

- Thank you so much, Ackeem.

Now we're headed to the stage to see a wonderful performance, (transition whooshing) (slow harp music) (slow harp music continues) (slow harp music continues) (transition whooshing) (gentle harp music) (gentle harp music continues) (gentle harp music continues) (gentle harp music continues) (gentle harp music continues) (transition whooshing) (slow relaxing music) (slow relaxing music continues) (slow relaxing music continues) (transition whooshing) - Our ancestors' memory, written in Detroit, based in Jamaica.

The dead of cells.

Its mutants.

A scar bigger than the eye can see, curdled into a ball, spliced without a taste to dampen its pain.

Black, blue, spotted, scarred.

No difference yet the same difference in the eyes of his dead brother.

Always scream at me, my Black body.

What have you done to see me, to penetrate the years of longing with the blinded tools that held me against a fence with barbed wires Ancestors hold my arms, twist them, bend them, why should I feel?

As my dreams and memories fade, so does my hope in becoming a yellow elder, I was saving grace in golden armor.

Why kiss me with a poison so slow?

Kill me fast.

Let me feel it.

Pierce me deep.

Twist your silver dagger, and cast me by the water to where I may see another color.

Brother hold my hand, not to let go.

Sow your skin onto mine as they hang to dry.

Soak your salt into my open wound, burn me ever so gently.

If I was to become a memory, how sweet would I taste?

(transition whooshing) "A Night in Blue," originally written as a poem for a solo violin.

In the forest, a boy sits in silence on a windy night.

He was very cold, sad and alone.

Tears fell.

The wind continued to blow.

He sat there with all those years on his shoulders, he stood on his feet, the wind over his body, clenched fists, tightened lips, worn eyes.

His heart began to scream, battling with his thoughts.

Tears began flowing, following a dying cry, crawl, walk, run.

You'll get there somehow.

He started to run slowly alone in the night.

Run Little island boy.

You'll never make it.

You are destined to fall just like the others before you.

Breathe (pants), inhale, exhale (chuckles), breathe.

A constant internal battle (pants).

Breathe to change your heart, make it better.

Do it for you.

Don't give up, enough!

Enough!

No more self-destruction.

You are loved.

Crawl, walk, run.

You'll get there somehow.

He crawled slowly finding his truth.

In the forest, a boy sits in silence on a windy night.

He has big dreams to live, to love, to laugh, to find happiness, to dream, never to be lost again.

(transition whooshing) - And we're back from the stage with Ackeem Salmon.

Hi Ackeem.

- Hello.

- Where did you begin your journey?

- My journey, I would say it started in Jamaica.

So I was born and raised in Jamaica.

So lived there for the, well for 16 years, and then moved to Detroit in 2014.

This is gonna be my 10th year in Detroit.

- How do you like Detroit?

- Detroit is amazing.

I think especially in terms of the art community and especially music community.

It has been, I wanna say it has been the backbone of nurturing in terms of my artistic curiosity.

If it wasn't for the community and the other artists that in a sense see that light in me and saying like, "Hey, you should just keep going, and keep doing," I think that has been really, really special.

Being in Detroit, - What inspires you?

- I would say the curiosity of learning more.

I feel that what I do through practice is just the idea of how do we learn as human beings.

When I see me adventuring in different forms or mediums, it's also an ode to my own ancestors, and genetics and saying like, "Oh, what are the capabilities that I've not been able to do before?"

Or you know, there's a saying, "I am my ancestors' dreams that didn't have the opportunity to come to fruition."

So sometimes I would sit down, and think of, wow, like what was my ancestors doing that allowed me to be attracted to this kind of rhythm, or this kind of visual work or this kind of emotion.

So I would say the curiosity of discovering more about that side.

So that's the more objective sense.

The other part is looking at my childhood growing up in Jamaica for instance, and see how in which my experience growing up in the Caribbean differs from all these different spaces, but also recontextualizing home at the same time.

So I'm here to look at the past and my childhood constantly seeing what over the years things have changed, and how it can impact myself.

- So what was it like growing up in Jamaica and what was your childhood like?

- I would say growing up in Jamaica, there's a lot of interesting freedom.

I would say every time I look at my work now, it is like a question of what did I experience through the pursuit of the arts, for instance.

So everything started when I was in high school.

I didn't grow up doing art.

So I started art only when I was in the ninth grade.

So I think that's a tipping point of high school here.

We start high school at seventh grade.

So I only really started like that genuine curiosity of the arts during high school.

- And what happened?

What happened that made you shift?

- What had ended up happening was that I had a hard decision to make.

I had a decision to choose between principal of business, the sciences or visual art.

I was definitely a huge science nerd.

I still am, that's all a huge part of my artwork today, which is really fun.

However, I would say there was a big decision between choosing principle of business or visual arts.

So in the ninth grade we took a major exam that in a sense let us know like, "Hey, do you want to take this for your final exams to matriculate to university?"

So taking my visual art exam, my art teacher kind of pulled me aside after the exam, and said, "Ackeem you need to do art."

So that hard talk gave me a compelling reason to do art.

So I did, and I didn't choose principal of business after all.

- But I'm sure you have that business acumen as part of what you're doing.

So you went to Paris?

- Yes.

- And what happened when you went to Paris?

When did you go to Paris?

- So I went to Paris during my third year of undergrad.

There were so many things that did happen in terms of all the people that I did meet, the people that found me for me, that was the first time I generally showed up, and I just became myself, because I knew no one, no one knew me, I didn't have any family.

I was going to a whole new country with just absolutely no expectations.

So getting this opportunity in my third year of undergrad, it allowed me to tap into so many parts of myself that was hard to, or I was scared to always being, like growing up in Jamaica, there's always this tension of hyper-masculinity, and I always had to show up a certain way.

There are things that I had to kind of withhold in terms of how do I express myself?

And it's the same thing being in Detroit, your entire family's here, so it's like you're kind of still with Jamaica in the end.

So getting to a space where it's completely foreign.

But I was able to really tap into so many curiosities.

I carried my violin with me.

Of course I went to an art and design school, but at the same time, that school also gave me a space to do music.

And then doing that space allowed me to meet so many people that were interested in all these multifacetedness of art making.

So of course I would be the one kid in the school with his violin on his back, going to his design classes.

And then of course through the violin, I was able to meet so many random people that now became such great friends.

And I started to, in a sense compose music for the first time.

This was a wonderful leap, because a friend during my undergrad essentially was like, "Have you ever thought about writing music?"

And this was also a time when I was doing my first fashion film and photography class.

So diving into art direction and filmmaking, I was able to take this passion for music and in a sense finding melodic lines, and writing my first music, which was also a poem.

So it was like I was writing the music but then I was breaking it down into the measures.

So each measure would be a line in the poem.

So what was the cool part is like during my fashion class, Ellie, who is my teacher, she really nurtured that, it was like, "Oh my gosh, I really, really enjoy music."

And then, you know, she was like, "Oh well why don't you take your work even further?

Like incorporate the violin or incorporate your passion for classical contemporary and just that aspect of new music."

And then that allowed me to see leaps and bounds because what I was doing through visual art, through the physical objective artifact, I was able to now see it moving.

So see it moving meaning like moving image.

So I was able to translate what I was painting or what I've been taking, still photograph, and start to tell these like lengthen stories.

So I was able to take this narrative I was building through composition, but also pairing it with this narrative of storytelling through what I'm able to see visually.

- Wow, now is this one of your designs that you're wearing?

- Oh yes.

In terms of styling, yeah.

- Styling.

It's wonderful.

- Thank you.

- Thank you Ackeem for giving us the pleasure of sitting down with you and speaking with you this evening.

And thank you for watching "Detroit Performs: Live from Marygrove," and we'll see you next time.

- [Announcer] Funding for "Detroit Performs" is provided by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, Gregory Haynes and Richard Sonenklar, the Kresge Foundation, the A. Paul and Carol C. Schaap Foundation, the Michigan Arts & Culture Council, the National Endowment for the Arts.

And by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

(upbeat music) (slow gentle music)