Muthi Reed

serena muthi reed works with digital media and design. Reed is an ethnographic artist. Their frequent life patterns of geographic & social migration are the premiere creative avenues for growing and shaping their work. Krewe Coumbite is Reed’s DJ/Veejay archive. Their live mixed sets use visual and sonic information as pathways for past/present/future community and kinfolk connectivity. Reed’s work is shaped in relationship -- relationship with people, environment, space, objects, movement, energy.

Muthi will work collaboratively with staff, students, and community members at Jubilee School in West Philadelphia to install a micro media lab. Muthi will provide basic tenets of media making from research and scripting to conducting interviews and non-linear audio/video editing. Through the educational media work, the project also seeks to create sustainable partnerships with local media organizations. It is Muthi’s goal to train young media makers so that they can eventually run the program, which will function as a catalyst for their school for many years to come. 

Muthi’s project will focus primarily on documenting the experiences of elder relatives and their kin through audio/photo documentation. They will travel from Philadelphia to Loundes County, Alabama, to connect with family members who have experienced life in the country or rural deep south. Family members will have the opportunity to speak first person about their experience of being black in America, growing up on small farms in the country during the 1930s and 1940s, being the children of sharecroppers and first and second descendants of enslaved people, and their relationship to the land to this day. Through this process, Muthi will create a series of original writings for performance looking loosely at a people’s relationship with the land, the impact of urbanization on identity, sustainable practice, and living off the land. Their background as an oral history documentarian working in communities as a poet and urban farmer make this project an opportunity to unite practice, awareness, and shared experience. The pieces will be performed both down south and locally in Philadelphia to honor ancestral memory and incite awareness for land based organizing.

Muthi will document her experiences training as a holistic health and massage therapy practitioner to create a short film on the role of holistic health for working class and low-income African Americans in Philadelphia.