Damon Locks: The Struggle Is Not Empty

I’m thrilled to be re-launching the 2025 edition of What Time Is It? with a portrait and conversation featuring my dear friend and confidant Damon Locks. Damon is an artist, musician, educator, and builder of more liberated worlds. Since 2014 he has been working with the Prisons and Neighborhood Arts Project at Stateville Correctional Center teaching art. Damon leads the Black Monument Ensemble, is a member of New Future City Radio, Exploding Star Orchestra and co-founded the band The Eternals. He is a 2025 recipient of the Creative Capital Award.

“Click
Yesterday I work up in a panic
Not the panic that swallows every sound and spins the wheel frantically but the panic when everywhere all the animals are crying. The insects are too. Birds, Frogs, The Kingdom of Spiders all prophecy…all allegory. The skyscrapers are on fire. I stay tuned in but the radio only plays a voice in the distance that is all but shrouded in static. The voice asks for help or advises on where to go for safety but I can’t understand the words nor where they are in time and space.

I look around to assess the risk but the silence is frightening and the room reflects nothing but the kind of nothing that happens before fingers from many hands press through the wooden slats covering the windows alerting you that there is no escape, the threat is all around you. Sincerely yours.” - Damon Locks, List of Demands, International Anthem (2024) 

Irina: Hello, Damon. 

Damon: Hello. How are you? 

Irina: I am here. I am here, you know, another day in our apocalyptic world. How about yourself? 

Damon: You know, how are you? It's just such a loaded question these days. So, as I've said often, I'm okay. I am grateful that my curiosity is being supported - and hopefully, I will continue to do the things that I'd like to do, but it is a struggle. 

Irina: The struggle is real. When you and I first met, you had just started working at PNAP with incarcerated artists at Stateville, and you were exploring the question of time with those artists…

Damon: Freedom and time!

Irina: Yes, freedom and time! So can you share a little bit about that and how that impacted your sense of time and your understanding of time?

Damon: Well the project came out of an exhibition that was being done at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum. I had met Heather Radke several months earlier. For some reason, fortuitously, Heather thought I might be a good person to collaborate on the project. She and Lisa Junkin Lopez brought me into the project and introduced me to Sarah Ross, and they were doing a project on the ideas around freedom, time and play.

They asked me if I'd be interested in teaching a class at Stateville for a semester, and Sarah and Fereshteh were already teaching a timeline class where guys in Stateville were making timelines and, you know, would I be interested in teaching and what would I do? And I said I would. I decided I would make an animation project because that would be cool and different and interesting. I was not an animator, but luckily I knew an animator who helped me orchestrate this project. 

That was my first time being in a prison and teaching within that structure, that institution. It really changed a lot about my life. We had the guys write about freedom, time and play, and I individually talked to each of them about their writing, looked at what was the stronger piece, and talked about how we could do a 100 frame vignette based on that writing. So each person was drawing 100 frames for animation, which turned into six seconds of animation. We spent, I'd say, 11 weeks worth of class working on these animations.

I was just blown away about that. Everyone was engaged and would be vulnerable enough to talk about freedom or time from their perspective of a people that more than likely would not have a life outside of the walls of the prison, and they were generous enough to dedicate some thought to this and I just thought it was super interesting to spend so much time to create something that's going to be six seconds long. The Freedom/Time piece, because almost no one talked about play, really there's one piece that incorporated a Pac Man image, but the piece is still one of the things I'm most proud of and it set a bar for me as an artist that I was like, I don't want to do less than this. 

That also changed my life too, because I was like, what does it mean to not do less than this? Like, how do you make work that's more engaged or equally engaged or is as thoughtful as that? Something that brings in collaborators and highlights other voices and, and creates some kind of conversation or proximity by existing. So yeah, that was that project. 

Irina: I'm curious if you remember any of the stories that the incarcerated artists shared with you, their reflections on time and freedom, if anything sticks out in your mind. 

Damon: Well, William Jones talked to me about his first…He was someone in his 60s that had been in prison since maybe ‘83. He told me the first couple of years of him being in prison, he didn't see the moon for several years and how that has had a big effect on him. His fear of the time that he was spending in prison was about all the people that he would lose while he was incarcerated and that was very moving. Joseph Dole created a piece that was different than everyone else's that still resonates every single time I show it. We took excerpts of their writing. We took like a little paragraph of their writing and did each animation so that you could get the vibe of what was being said, even though the animation was not a literal translation of what the writing was but we wanted to kind of set it up in a particular way based on this writing. And Joe said that, you know, lots of people said that art was their freedom and the way that they could imagine or be outside of the walls. 

Joe was like, art is not freedom. Freedom is not being behind the walls, but art helps pull the wool over his eyes for a few minutes. He did a piece that shows someone behind bars. The figure was in the foreground, and the bars were behind him, and in the background was the silhouette of a child growing up. As the child grew up and became a cheerleader and got married, the person in the foreground was getting old. So as the person got married and the person was pregnant, the foreground person was turned into a skeleton and crumbled. And then she had her baby and the baby came to the prison bars to the foreground. So it was held by the bars and she turned into America and I was just like, wow, this is so intense. So every time I watch that one, it's like a subject of conversation, like it's a showstopper, every single time. And interestingly enough, I talked to Joe about it, maybe a year and a half ago. And he didn't quite remember that the baby went behind bars and stuff. It's just one of those pieces of art that was like, kind of, maybe beyond him. You know, like, he did it. He created it in collaboration with Rob Shaw, the person that actually animated the drawings and made this powerful piece, but since he couldn't see the work  after he turned it in, I mean, he saw it once or twice, but once the work is gone, it wasn't like in his brain the same way as it's in mine.

Irina: I remember that piece from when you screened it at Hull House. It's also very interesting how those ideas flowed out of him and manifested onto that piece of paper and then kind of dissipated in some ways. There are those metaphors about artistic practice where it's like you become the vessel and things pour out of you. Do you ever feel that way about your practice as an artist or educator? 

Damon: For the last 10 years or so, I put a lot of attention into the intentions of the work, and then I rely on the skills that I have garnered over the years, and then I just let happen what needs to happen - whether it's the sound work, or whether it's the visual work, or whether it's the teaching, I let whatever unfolds happen and I follow it. I don't always know what's going to happen. If I'm paying attention, then I create the thing that needs to be created. If I'm working with intention, then generally it comes out in the way that I was hoping, but without having that extreme control over the mark-making or the sounds that you like to allow in, then you're able to sit back and see what was made without being like, yeah, I intended that to happen. Sometimes you just don't know why you're doing a thing and then you find out when it's done. 

Irina: I see that a lot in your process. It's interesting because your practice, there's obviously a lot of sampling, there's a lot of sound images, there's collage, and you work with human beings often, so I see that formula of intention and then practice, but then there's also some kind of spontaneous or emergent happening. There's the magic. No one can predict it. You can't really control it and it just happens, but it's also very much rooted in doing research, you know, having relationships, living life. Your practice is very international and rooted in much history.

Damon: When I use archival material, I hope to be a good steward of that material and keep that conversation moving forward. So I'm honored to create something from that material and hope that I do justice to it. So not necessarily claiming it for myself, you know, just how can I create a vehicle to keep that thing moving? 

Irina: Yeah, I think that's a really important role: how do we keep history present? How do we pave these pathways and also remix the history and the present and the future in ways that might illuminate some truth or some question or some feeling that we need for these times?

Damon: Yeah, I agree. When you say “remix”, I think I think about it in terms of - because collage is a mode that I enjoy using - I think about the sounds that I'm using, what the sounds indicate, and what they're telling us, the quality of recording, the way people talk, their accents, you know, all of what they're saying, what language is being used, kind of indicates and sets them in a time and then if you juxtapose that with a totally different sound that complements it, but from a totally different era, then your brain has to like interpolate a new space for those things to fit. So that new space could be the future, or it could just be a place that we haven't envisioned yet. So I think that I think less of the “remix”, even though I think that that's the accurate term, but I think about the juxtaposition of these things. So that your brain has to use this information to create something new that we haven't seen before.

Irina: Yeah, for sure. I think of it as a weaving of timelines. Where, through the juxtaposition, there's a new meaning that emerges. I can't remember if it was Trenchmouth or The Eternals, one of the earlier tracks that you played in that interview where you had. I can't remember if it was radio static.
Damon: There was radio static in “Power to the Amplifier.”

Irina: I was like, okay, I see early Damon communicating with the future. I think it's a cool, way to fuck with the timeline - Or to like, you know, kind of mess with the linearity of time. 

Damon: Think of Kerry James Marshall's work, where he took that trope, all of those signifiers And reconfigured them, remixed them, as it were.  

Irina: Yeah, his show was called Mastery, right? 

Damon: Yes!

Irina: I'm curious: where is it even useful to talk about yourself and your practice as one that is rooted in activism? How do you navigate that?  

Damon: Some people have trouble being called an artist. I have been called an artist since I was a child because I always liked to draw. So everyone in my family was like, Oh, Damon's the artist. So it was the artist in the family always. So, it's not a thing for me. Like, I've been called an artist since I was like in third grade. I have not been as accepting of the term “activist.” I personally have always seen what I do as being the job of an artist.  So I stay kind of in the position of being an artist. That's where I situate myself. Within the art, the more I learn, the more connections I make and the more collaborations I do, this is just the focus of my art-making. And I think that's the actual medium. It is communication. Then I choose what will communicate this idea the best that might be sound. It might be visual work. It might be teaching. It might be having a group of people get together to talk about an idea. Like, what is the best medium for it? I don't put that on my CV. I just think of it as the work I have to do. 

Irina: Well, as you know, the grounding question of this project that comes from Grace Lee Boggs and Jimmy Boggs is what time is it on the clock of the world?

Damon: I feel things are pretty dire right now. Regardless of whether people have the tendency of responding that it's always been dire. I think the global reach that has happened, the amount of possible and actual destruction of lives and the potential destruction of lives, it feels so much greater. Because the reach is so much wider or longer, I don't know what's the appropriate term. So things feel very dire to me and it's hard to feel positive, but I don't know “positive” has ever really been a good adjective for me. So you know, I continue to do the things I feel compelled to do and the. The hardest part is, no matter what you do, you can spend most of your time because there's so much sorrow and despair in the world, that you can spend all the time that you have thinking that you're not doing enough, but the challenge is to find what you can do and do that and try to be effective at doing that.

So within the things that I can do, how can I keep making decisions that  will hopefully move a needle forward and be giving in a way that is specific to what I can do? So I have to think about how the different projects I am involved in can lend themselves hopefully better, like treating people well and making space for something more beautiful or something critical or something evocative or something illuminating in a way that is true to me that can bring my powers to.

Irina: Well, it sounds like you're doing the right thing. I have one last question, which is: just imagining this archive were to be discovered 50 to 100 years from now. Assuming there are still humans to discover it, what would you like them to know about this time? 

Damon: To know that people cared or that people were thinking and people were doing. I think that's important, you know maybe it's a reference book, you know, maybe it's material to be collaged in ways. So I think it's important to leave evidence so that someone else can pick up the baton. You know there's a song that I wrote called “Power” off the first Black Monument Record that says “The struggle is not empty - the power we bring into be.” you know, so it's difficult as the struggle is bringing something into the space that the next person can pick up and move forward.