As a participating artist in Emory University’s inaugural Arts and Social Justice (ASJ) Fellowship, Okorie “OkCello” Johnson delivers, “Hopefully,” a powerful musical, poetic, and visual communication about the United States’ racial reckoning at the intersection of mental health.
This work of art, created in collaboration with Professor Dr. Elizabeth Walker, of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory; her Prevention of Mental and Behavioral Disorders students; and video artist Gabriela Arp, marks the first time that OkCello brings together his multiple identities: cellist, composer, educator and film producer.
The piece is the yield of a 5-month process of Okorie’s planning with Dr. Walker about how to approach the exploration of social justice and mental health; his facilitation with the students of her class on what and how they would contribute to the project; and his collaboration with producer and visual artist, Gabriela Arp, on how to represent the music and the poetry visually in the final piece.
“I believe that a piece of this nature, which brings together the academic and the artistic, the institutional and the personal, and the painful and the restorative, is exactly the kind of project that will increase our collective capacity to see the world we live in, and its current tragedies, with both accuracy and courage. It will enable us to create - not so much amend or reform - but generate anew from our best intentions and our most rigorously informed bodies of knowledge: the world that we want to live in.
