Imagining Black Diasporas: An Evening of Music and Performance

Discover themes of the exhibition Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics through a special evening of music and performances that will activate LACMA's campus. Author, artist, and abolitionist Patrisse Cullors’s meditative Swing Low, Sweet Chariot will be followed with a three-part performance by Bloco Obini, the all-woman Afro-Brazilian drumming ensemble founded by Kahlil Cummings's Extra Ancestral.

Patrisse Cullors’s Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, originally presented at The Bunker as part of A Wing and a Prayer, expands the scope and reach of the work. Featuring an orchestral arrangement performed by the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles and vocals by Avriel Epps and Philip Agnew, this performance draws deeply from the spiritual’s historical ties to the Underground Railroad and its coded messages of escape, survival, and Black liberation.

This work is dedicated to Angelenos—especially Black and Brown Angelenos—impacted by the devastating wildfires that have scarred both land and life. It is a gesture of care for those who have lost homes, family members, and communities. It is a call to hold each other more tenderly and imagine what it means to create safety beyond survival. In this offering, Swing Low becomes not only a spiritual lament but a collective imagining—a homegoing for the past and a homecoming for our future. This performance insists that freedom is not a metaphor. It is a practice. It is sacred. And it belongs to us.

Bloco Obini will then activate Imagining Black Diasporas and LACMA's campus. After a serene abertura, the performance will move through the museum campus, culminating in a grand finale, a high-energy explosion of samba-reggae rhythms, synchronized drumming, and joyful movement. The all-women ensemble will unite strength, spirit, and celebration in a powerful closing that honors ancestry and uplifts community.