The Power of Art: Faylita Hicks and A New Name For My Love

“Paradise: Where I am more than my mistakes, more than my bad days and my hard times. Where I am not confined by the outlines of this country’s bad dreams” - Faylita Hicks, Take Me to Paradise

Art is an amplifier of justice. When intertwined with activism and calls to action, artists help our communities imagine a new, more just world. Faylita Hicks is a perfect example of an artist doing just that.

We sat down with Faylita to discuss how thier art intertwines with justice.

Faylita is a queer Afro-Latinx activist, writer, and interdisciplinary artist, who uses their intersectional experiences to advocate for the rights of BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people. Their most recent album A NEW NAME FOR MY LOVE — currently up for Grammy consideration — is a love letter to activists that challenges a world of cages and punishment and presents a world of opportunities and true safety.

We are very fortunate at CRC to have Faylita bringing their vision to our work — in fact, they have drafted poetry specifically for our policy work, including poems to celebrate the announcement of the Abolition Amendment to end Constitutional slavery and to imagine true safety with the People’s Response Act.

Faylita’s work is a reminder of how impactful our Artist-in-Residence program is in our work. Through this program, we invite our audiences to engage in conversations about the punishment bureaucracy and think through how we can work collectively to imagine a world without cages.

Supporters like you make this narrative-shifting work possible. As Giving Tuesday approaches at the end of this month, consider making a gift to expand this program.

Stay tuned for the final Artist-in-Residence interview with visual artist Sherrill Roland coming up in January.