MIX AT SIX
DAMON LOCKS'S
BLACK MONUMENT ENSEMBLE
October 24, 2025 / 6:00PM
Run Time: 60–75 minutes, no intermission
About Damon Locks's Black Monument Ensemble
Harris Theater Mission Statement | Staff + Board | Our Supporters
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This program is generously sponsored by
About Damon Locks's Black Monument Ensemble
Originally conceived as a medium for Chicago-based multimedia artist and educator Damon Locks’s sample-based sound collage work, Black Monument Ensemble (BME) has evolved from a solo mission into a vibrant collective of artists, musicians, singers, and dancers making work with common goals of joy, compassion, and intention. Galvanized by Locks’s conceptualizing, poeticizing, and guiding vision, the contributors represent the richness and diversity of Black artistic excellence in Chicago. Together they weave unique perspectives and experiences for uplifting, anthemic, and highly animated musical performances.
The inception of Black Monument Ensemble came about after Locks's first semester teaching art inside Stateville Correctional Center, a maximum security men’s prison about an hour outside of Chicago, in 2014. Seeing the “justice system” at work at close range while at the same time experiencing the public deaths of people like Mike Brown and Sandra Bland and many others caused him to rethink his art and music practice. To process all of this information about where we stand in terms of race relations in the U.S. he turned to sound. The first iteration of this processing formed the building blocks of what Black Monument was to become. It was a solo performance (for the most part, save one song which featured the percussionist Damien Thompson) in 2015 where archival recordings were juxtaposed with beds of sound built by samples and other electronics.
Through this deep dive into archival materials: poetry, speeches, storytelling, interviews, documentaries, a method of building sonic essays came about. The desire to build upon that was a natural impulse. He began working alongside dancers with the Chicago Westside company, Move Me Soul and slowly put together a group of five singers and a percussionist to put on the first unnamed performance of the group. That first performance took place in his visual art studio at Hyde Park Art Center in 2017.
From then on, the project continued to grow performing at such places as Garfield Park Conservatory, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Chicago Cultural Center, and Millennium Park. The group has been lucky enough to travel to London, Paris, and Utrecht, and last fall they performed in São Paulo, Brazil.
Two albums and a pandemic later, Black Monument is on the brink of recording their third album. They are making plans to perform at Stateville Correctional Center where it all began (conceptually). For this show, Black Monument Ensemble will bring to the Walker stage a collection of the songs that got them to where they are today. The concern and the frustration, as well as the joy and jubilation will all be present as they perform their journey from first album (Where Future Unfolds) to second album (NOW), to Beyond (a song for the new record).
BME is a multi-generational collective whose members range from 13–55 years old.
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ARTIST ROSTER
Damon Locks, Ensemble leader, vocals and arrangements
Dana Hall, drums
Arif Smith, percussion
Angel Bat Dawid, clarinet
BSA Gold, flute
Eva Supreme, vocals
Monique Golding, vocals
Tramaine Parker, vocals
with movement by Move Me Soul
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
DAMON LOCKS
Damon Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, vocalist/musician. Since 2014, he has been working with the Prison and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. He spent four years as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy High School. He currently teaches Improvisation in the Sound Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Locks leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals.
DANA HALL
Dana Hall has been an important musician on the international music scene since 1992, after leaving aerospace engineering for a life in music. He has teaching and performance credits on six continents and concert, club, and festival experience throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia as both a bandleader and with such luminaries as Branford Marsalis, Chick Corea, Horace Silver, Ray Charles, Benny Golson, Betty Carter, and Maria Schneider, among others. Hall is a 2019 Camargo Foundation Fellow in Composition. His multidisciplinary work commemorating the 75th anniversary of the publication of Richard Wright’s Native Son, The Hypocrisy of Justice: Sights and Sounds from the Black Metropolis, premiered to critical acclaim on the stage of Chicago’s renowned Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center. Hall’s most recent commission, which premiered in May 2024, is an orchestral work memorializing the 2015 and 2022 anti-black mass shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina and Tops Friendly Markets in Buffalo, New York.
Hall is a Professor of Music and the Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs at DePaul University. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland. His scholarship is principally concerned with issues of ethnicity, identity, and temporality; popular musics of the world; music as protest and resistance; and musics of both the African continent and the African Diaspora. Hall's dissertation is a historical ethnography of Philly Soul during the Black Power Movement.
ARIF SMITH
Arif Smith is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker. His polymodal artistic work centers on African-rooted cultural practices and diasporic citizenship, exploring marronage, intertextuality, and Black radical imagination. Smith was a 2017–18 Artist-in-Residence at University of Chicago’s Arts + Public Life and Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, and received the 3Arts Make-A-Wave Award in 2021. Currently, he leads Music Moves Chicago, Old Town School of Folk Music’s place-based initiative that aims to inspire, restore, and transform communities by providing access to arts education, concerts, and workforce readiness through partnerships with community organizations and other institutions located in South and West side neighborhoods. Smith is a Research Associate at the Field Museum. He is also a member of Black Monument Ensemble, Los Medicos, Iré Elese Abure, and is founder of Frog Belly Society.
ANGEL BAT DAWID
Angel Bat Dawid is a Black American composer, improviser, clarinetist, pianist, vocalist, educator, and DJ celebrated for her contributions to contemporary jazz and Black cultural expression. Her debut album, “The Oracle” (2019), released via Chicago’s International Anthem, received praise for its deep exploration of Black life, history, and spirituality. In 2024, she premiered her solo clarinet piece, “The Black Queen of Italy Strolls Through Her Garden,” at Villa Medici in Rome. Her diverse works include "Requiem for Jazz" performed at Hyde Park Jazz Festival, and “Peace: A Suite for Skylanding” composed and premiered for the Art Institute of Chicago & Chicago Humanities Festival as part of Yoko Ono’s SkyLanding installation in Chicago's Jackson Park.
Recognized in DownBeat Magazine’s 2025 Critics Poll as Clarinetist of the Year and Rising Composer of the Year, she was also featured in Pitchfork’s “Pitchfork 25 Next,” served as Winter JazzFest Artist-in-Residence in 2022, and is a 2025 United States Artist Fellow, as well as a 2025 Artist in Residence at Northwestern University’s Black Arts Consortium.
BSA GOLD
BSA Gold is a producer and flutist from Washington, DC. Inspired by the pioneering spirit of Pharoah Sanders, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Sade, and the traditional sounds of her Ethiopian heritage, she explores themes of self-understanding, compassion, love, and spirituality through synths and electronics.
BSA Gold has been featured in film and television including Adult Swim, Tolu Coker’s “Right Fist,” for SHOWstudio and True False Film Festival with Dominic Yarabe, and she enjoys collaborations across mediums and genre. Based in Chicago, she curates music and performance programs across the city and performs as a member of Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble.
TRAMAINE S. PARKER
Tramaine S. Parker began singing at the age of four in the angelic choir at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church in Chicago. Since then, she has sung for S the Chicago Children’s Choir, John Work Chorale, Vocality, Black Monument Ensemble, Lakeside Singers, Chicago Freedom Singers featuring Kathleen Battle, and, most recently, for Chance the Rapper. Parker has sung in distinguished venues like Ravinia, Carnegie Hall, and Riverside Church New York, and she has performed in numerous countries including Brazil, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Ghana, and Denmark. In addition to performing, Parker is dedicated to the social welfare if children and works for the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services as a Child Welfare Specialist at the SCR unit (Child Abuse Hotline) in Chicago.
MONIQUE GOLDING
Monique Golding began singing before the age of five at home and at her mother’s church. Her vocal style is influenced by Gospel, Jazz, R&B, and Spiritual genres. She began pursuing music professionally in 2017 when she arrived to Chicago, IL. Golding began performing with Damon Locks and Black Monument Ensemble in 2018. She is a member of Angel Bat Dawid’s Sistazz of the Nitty Gritty with whom she has performed at various venues domestically and internationally. When not performing, Golding works as a full-time consultant and is raising two daughters, one of whom is also a member of the Black Monument Ensemble.
EVA SUPREME
Eva Supreme is a multi-genre vocalist rooted in gospel, jazz, funk, and experimental soul. Eva has lent her voice to powerful collaborations and collectives, including background vocals for legendary artists like Cassandra Wilson, Jamila Woods, and Angel Bat Dawid. She is also a vibrant part of the revolutionary Damon Locks’s Black Monument Ensemble, where liberation, sound, and spirit meet in bold sonic protest.
Supreme's world is one of soft power and luxurious whimsy: gospel riffs wrapped in gold lamé, funk grooves under moonlight, and jazz phrases whispered like secrets. She creates because she must, performing because it’s the most honest way she knows how to live. Supreme has performed on international stages including the China National Opera House, Carnegie Hall, and Harris Theater.
MOVE ME SOUL
Move Me Soul is a community-based dance company that provides an innovative platform for inner-city youth to train and evolve as the next generation of dancers, choreographers, and teachers. Performers are engaged in dancemaking, storytelling, and character development that allows them to curate their own aesthetics of the past, present, and future.
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Land Acknowledgement
The Harris Theater for Music and Dance resides on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. Many other tribes such as the Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, and Fox have also called this area home. The region has long been a center for Indigenous people to gather, trade, and maintain kinship ties. Today, one of the largest urban American Indian communities in the United States resides in Chicago, and members of this community continue to contribute to the life and culture of this city.
To learn more about the practice of land acknowledgement and the importance of honoring native land, visit usdac.us. The Chicagoland region is home to over 65,000 American Indians and the country’s oldest urban-based Native membership community center, American Indian Center Chicago (AIC). Visit aicchicago.org to learn more about AIC’s mission to foster physical and spiritual health in the community, an active connection with traditional values and practices, stronger families with multigenerational bonds, and a rising generation of educated, articulate, and visionary youth.
Photo Credits: Harris Theater Exterior by Hedrich Blessing. Harris Theater Nevelson Reflection by Kyle Flubacker. Black Monument image courtesy of the artist. Damon Locks by Jamie Kelter Davis. Angel Bat Dawid by Frédéric Ragot. Monique Golding by Vera Marmelo. Harris Theater donors by Kyle Flubacker.