

The museum director, Africanist Art Historian Dr. The Museum of Art and Origins is a landmark, private museum showcasing mainly African art. Known as the environment that produced hip hop in the early 1970s, The Bronx represents an authentic, urban New York space away from antiseptic, gentrified zones and serves as a canvas for representing the genuine nature of our featured artists. To visualize these concepts, we filmed in the streets of The Bronx and at the Museum of Art and Origins in Harlem. Storyboard P attests to this fundamental truth: “the whole point of the street is rebelliousness because street dancing is an extension of slave dancing.” Knowing that jazz and flex are cousins, we convened these forms into a modern dialogue that reflects our present moment in time. America’s classic music-so called “jazz”-and Black street dance, particularly hip hop dance, flex and bruk up in the case of Storyboard P, are profoundly defiant, independent, and innovative art forms cementing the Black experience. The poignancy of their coming together takes us deeper, beyond the surface of this urban setting and this track. The rare collaboration between Strickland and Storyboard P marks a historic moment-a bonafide jazz musician working with an established hip hop

Storyboard P’s forms are carried by footwork so smooth that he seems to defy the laws of gravity and illusion is created through animated movement that appears to fracture space and time. He discards flashy displays of technique for an incomparable, original body language that employs a futurist and transcendental vocabulary. Hip hop dancer Storyboard P’s personal brand of dramatic mutation mannerism and emotionally charged, trance-inducing contortions ofīody and face place him at the center of the film as an ethereal superbeing that expresses the tensions between love and lust. Thematically, the song grapples with the unmasking of infatuation in the context of love as the building block of the universe, as we first hear through the powerful words of Greg Tate. The film features Strickland himself, poet Greg Tate, vocalist Bilal, rapper Pharoahe Monch, and visual recording artist Storyboard P. In this way, Strickland’s work is both about freedom and heritage, and the film mirrors this awareness. Saxophonist Marcus Strickland’s ON MY MIND remix blends many branches of African-American music, from jazz to hip hop and soul, and beyond. ON MY MIND is an abstract, Afro-cosmic film, aesthetically and symbolically grounded in African culture and New York history.
