Still We RISE

This year’s festival art is anchored in Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” — a visual anthem of resilience, power, and joy.

Our aesthetic pulls from the bold lines of political poster art, the brilliance of Afrofuturist visionaries, and the lush imagination of artists like Kerry James Marshall and Mati Klarwein. Flowers — especially roses — rise as symbols of beauty, protest, celebration, and mourning. They bloom as sound bursting from instruments, as threads weaving musicians together, as offerings of joy in defiance of silence. At the center: two hands rise up, cupped open — offering and receiving — just like jazz itself, a prayer carried on rhythm. As current powers attempt Black erasure, this festival centers Black American music, where protest is joy, music is power, and gathering is resilience.

"Still I Rise" by Dr. Maya Angelou is officially used here with permission of Caged Bird Legacy, LLC