Toshi Reagon doesn’t stop. The Brooklyn-based musician hosts music festivals, collaborates with dance companies, writes operas—her last project was an opera based on Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower, co-written with her mom—and performs. Reagon’s most recent project is visual. Ahead of the election in November, For Freedoms, a political action group that calls for civic engagement through art, commissioned Reagon to create an image to display on a highway billboard in Houston. This month, For Freedoms unveiled its nationwide public art project, a collection of billboards meant to inspire people to envision a more just world. See Reagon’s billboard, on display through November 8, off the northbound side of Interstate 45 near Aldine.
Reagon’s piece is a set of her lyrics superimposed on an Afrofuturist self-portrait of photographer Lola Flash. The image comes from Flash’s series “syzygy, the vision,” where the artist imagines herself as every Black person subjected to the harms—racism, mass incarceration, homophobia, sexism—that are endemic to life in the United States. This year, perhaps more than ever, Texas is a battleground state. Reagon’s billboard, which calls for unity through acknowledgment of universal human struggles, found an appropriate home here. With her piece, Reagon hopes to make people stop in their tracks and consider their relationships with themselves, each other, and the earth.
