(Jazz Beat music) What do we do NEXT I can be consumed by whats lost or whats left When you see us, see us at our best See what came before and imagine and imagine better what comes ne comes next.

(Singing) ( Cello music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - So NEXT is about showcasing the artistry and the talents of artists of color in our community.

These are artists who are doing incredible work, but often don't have the same access to venues or visibility as their counterparts.

And so we really wanted to, as an organization, create a space, whether it's the digital space or real life, to be able to showcase these artists and for more individuals within our community to know about them and to engage with them and to help them get to their next level.

We have grown into an arts and social action organization, but really we started just sitting around our kitchen tables thinking about what we, as artists, need and what artists need out in the community to really fly, to really grow.

And over time, we've evolved and grown and partnered with other amazing organizations here in the city of Atlanta, allowing us to be on either bigger platforms so these artists can have their voice amplified even more to the point where we are today on literally a MARTA platform, which is an incredible connector in the city, where these artists get to share their talents for everyone in our city to enjoy.

(cello music) - Two of the reasons that NEXT is such a great collaborator for us.

On one hand, they're bringing such quality artwork and artists.

They also are helping us do something that we strive to do, which is to support and amplify communities who don't always get the spotlight.

MARTA's art collection, when it came about in the late 70s, didn't reflect the population of Atlanta.

And so being able to kind of right that imbalance, let's call it, and then improve, is important to us.

So we're really glad to have NEXT as a partner.

- [Faith] This performance that you're about to see is from the incredible author and poet, host of the Moth storytelling event, Jon Goode.

He is Atlanta's poet Grio.

This particular piece is called, "(re)Train of Thought," and it speaks specifically to this moment that we're living in into what we need to do to get to next.

(soft jazz music) (soft jazz music) - We've all been trained and taught that there's only one lane, one track of thought in this thing called life that we live.

Get into a good college, get a good job, find a good husband, a good wife, a good dog, have 2.5 good kids.

But what happens when that train of thought comes off the track?

When a pandemic comes with silent solitude makes me and you sit in it and reexamine all of that?

When your job sends you home and you are not sure if you are ever coming back?

When you and your spouse or lover, a home alone and discover that you have nothing in common except kids, the bills, and the love for the same social media apps?

What do you do with that?

But then again, in that same timeframe, some of us discovered that, that we love the feel of the sun on our skin, and grass beneath our feet.

That we feel more like ourselves when we exercise some, eat, and get the proper sleep.

And that what we've been making can't be called a living when we're spending 80 hours in a cubicle or a kitchen every week.

The pandemic gave us time to rediscover we.

And just as we were settling into that feeling, just as we began healing and felt like we could breathe, Breonna Taylor was shot by police while sleeping in her own bed.

And George Floyd begs for his mother as a cop smothers his knee across George's neck and head.

And Rashard Brooks falls asleep in a drive-through just before an officer shoots him dead.

And all of a sudden, the right track feels like a ledge.

And all of a sudden, many of us feel led to the streets where we will speak and find our voice and raise that voice in a picket sign at a rally at Five Points.

Five Points where we will sign a petition to bring Brittney Griner home from Russian prisons, cages, and courts.

Five Points where we will stay, see a fair fight with the governor gets all of her votes.

Five Points where we will mourn the victims of Uvalde, of Buffalo, of Hyde Park, of all of those shot in 2022's 318 mass shooting reports.

Where we will tell the world that we are not anti-life just because we are pro-choice.

Raise our voice that for too long has been bound and drowned by the partisan laws politicians have made.

And then, ride a wave where our autonomy is assured whether we roll or wade.

And right now, let me say, that I know that every stride we have made toward the sun, up this track, we have made as one.

And I know that there are some that would rather see us in the dark, alone in our homes when the last two years have shown that we're stronger and better together than apart.

And I know that that this train moving steady up the track, heading one way and never coming back, that we hope that it leads to somewhere safe.

In fact, I can see the place.

Close your eyes tight, and imagine if you might, buying a home with a loan that comes with no red lines.

A community built by you and me where we can dance in the street and sing our babies to sleep at bedtime.

Where we will build schools that teach a history of our ancestry that does not begin with slavery and rope burns from deadlines.

Where we will police ourselves with caring compassion, justice, and community interaction instead of guns, fear, overreaction, and mandatory fed time.

Imagine black faces in safe spaces where the laws are not built to bound and cage us, where the laws are not built by slave patrolling races.

Close your eyes tight and imagine a life where they don't gerryman the districts.

Where the news doesn't carry views where bias explicit, implicit, or slander in the statistics.

Imagine a night where blue lights don't make you fear for your life, fear for your loved ones.

Where you can give your son the keys, your blessings on his date, and the car to borrow and not wonder if a air freshener and license plate will cost him all of his tomorrows, where all of his tomorrows look like a chance to grow old.

For you to become grand, grand mine, granddad, and watch grow the seeds that you've sown instead of watching your children grow to be hashtags.

Close your eyes, if you will, and imagine as we rebuild the culture, as we rebuild and grow closer, as we rebuild Rosewood and Tulsa, as we build black judges and lawyers and politicians that would not ignore the will of the voters.

Imagine you being the beginning of generational wealth.

Imagine you being the ending of disparities in health.

Imagine white people not stealthily trying to touch your locks.

Imagine white people not steadily trying to gentrify your blocks.

Imagine the blocks, the lots, the 40 acre land plots that belonged to your great-great grand pops once again being yours.

Now, open your eyes and imagine that you're not imagining anymore.

When you see us, see us at our best.

See what came before and imagine better what comes next.

Yeah.

That's it.

Something like that, right?

- [Katherine] Well, the mission of Art Bound is to enhance customer's experience of the system to bring high quality arts and culture to our customers and bring it to them where they are.

Not everybody has a chance to go to the High Museum every day, to go to the symphony every day, to go check out all the many incredible cultural offerings Atlanta has.

And so to be able to bring that to our ridership is really important.

And we always try to bring some kind of community engagement aspect to the arts as well.

So for instance, we opened a piece called "Reflection Tunnel" over on the Grant Street Tunnel near our King Memorial MARTA Station.

And with that, we had a local historian go and talk to people and get their oral history, kind of the stories on either side of the tunnel that connected the two neighborhoods.

And so it was "Reflection Tunnel" because it was made of highway reflectors, but also reflections of people who live in the neighborhood.

So bringing that community aspect is really important to us.

In general, I think too, walking through a station, hearing music, walking through a station, seeing something beautiful or artistic, it just...

It brightens your day a little bit.

You know, it makes you feel like, "Someone knows I'm here, and they care what my experience is."

The artists they work with not only work with a variety of genres, but they're really at kind of the top of their game.

They've mastered their craft.

They're no longer that raw talent, but they're also not ready to hang it up and get the lifetime achievement award yet.

- Really about using the power of art in a way that can really create, um, powerful social change in our communities.

In many ways, when everything else fails, art works.

When conversations fail, when we are divided by politics or race or economics, art works.

Art can be that space where people can commune and convene and be able to get to some place of unity.

Every single one of these artists that we work with have a long history of being committed to social change.

They're part of NEXT because they are powerful artists, but they're also art activists.

The next performance is by Okorie "OKCello" Johnson.

This is an incredible piece by this Atlanta-based cellist.

It includes looping technologies, it includes this beautiful rendition of his cello performance as well as, maybe for the first time, spoken word.

And all together, these have been combined into a beautiful piece that Okorie Johnson developed just for NEXT and for MARTA.

And this is called, "Right Now."

(tapping) (tapping) (plucking strings) (plucking strings) (plucking strings) (plucking strings) (plucking strings) (plucking strings) (tapping and plucking sounds) (tapping and plucking sounds) - Right now, it's clear that the world is changing, aggressively, for all of us.

For some, it's too much change too soon.

For some others of us, it's the nascent beginning of a world we've waited for for far too long.

What is certain, however, is that the world is never going back to what it was.

(plays cello) And yes, I'm dismayed by the leaps back after the mini steps forward that we've made.

And yes, I'm often overwhelmed by the avalanche of overreaction to the long awaited course corrections.

So let's embrace this chaos.

Let's stand unmoved in this tornado and guide these swirling parts to the places where they were intended to be.

And through our cries and shouts and songs and bouts and bars and acts and myths and facts, let's birth this new next world into existence.

(cello music and tapping) (cello music and tapping) (cello music and tapping) (cello music and tapping) (cello music and tapping) (cello music and tapping) (cello music and tapping) (cello music and tapping) (cello music) (cello music) - And so this collaboration with MARTA is an extension of that.

You know, if there's a way for us to bring together these five amazing artists and work on a high visibility platform, like MARTA, in a way that allows them to speak to the issues that we, as a community, are facing and inspire our community to get to a better place, then we've done our job.

And so this is just part of our ongoing mission.

The next artist is Carlos Andres Gomez.

Carlos Andres Gomez is a poet, an author, an actor.

This piece, just using Carlos's love of words and beautiful music provided by our own CC Sunchild, is called, "Good Trouble."

- What do we do next?

I can be consumed by what's lost or what's left.

Be broken or fervent, hopeless or urgent.

Lately, I wanna move less.

Just stay in one place for a few seconds and just follow my breath.

What a gift to breathe, to carve out any space for reprieve.

What a gift to grieve and celebrate and dance and protest for trans kids and gay rights and black life and the rights of my wife and to protect every breath of joy in every body and every life that somehow still matters less than the lives of those who make laws.

We are expected to respect the greatest horrors in history we know have been legislated and legal.

So... What next?

What are you gonna do with the rest of this one life?

With your one vote?

With your one voice?

With these feet that can pack every inch of concrete?

When the Constitution says we can, but the cops say it's their streets.

When the beat in your chest makes it hard to speak, but you must.

When the history is written and you are dust, what will you have done?

(chuckles) My son always begs we take another minute more than I can give.

And that's it, right?

A life lived so big that it spills over and smooths every sharp edge till it's so full it can barely hold its center.

Ruptured open and soothed, called toward a grace I witness less and less.

But let's be clear.

When my daughter alchemizes the words in a book and reads to me before bed, nothing any longer feels complex.

Nothing is fractured or fraught or gerrymandered.

There is just a six year old making magic of a language.

She already wields like a blade and a brain as sharp and precise as that last wink of sunlight that welcomes another long day in a twilight.

We stand in that liminal space right now between darkness and light, between what is and what might be possible.

I owe my kids a world not yet here.

So I must and I will pull a world from this rubble, through that good trouble, through that good fight.

(soft piano music) - So to be very honest, I think the seed of the idea was the NPR Tiny Desk, right?

We'd seen these performances, I think everyone, almost everyone, knows about this, where performers come on NPR, and they perform in this space.

And it's, for many people, the first time they're seeing someone who, in a couple of years, is gonna end up being a household name.

What if we turn a MARTA train into a sound set?

And we were able to have the artists come on and perform a commission piece that we, NEXT and MARTA, commission them to really speak to the issues that we were dealing with.

The issues of the pandemic, the issues of racial reckoning.

We wanted to also turn the MARTA into sort of a concert venue, right?

Where it looks like you're invited in.

In many ways, it's just sort of you and the artists sharing this moment.

And after you are able to sort of engage with the artistry, the music, the words, that you leave feeling edified, um, refueled, ready and able as a community to move on to what we need to do next.

And so you'll see in each one of these performances, not just a discussion of where we are and what we're enduring, but how do we move on from here?

Where do we go from here, and what do we need to do, artists, community members, our city as a whole, to get to a place that we actually want to live in?

The next artist is Melissa A. Mitchell.

Melissa Mitchell is an incredible self-taught artist, designer, and multimedia artist.

She owns her own clothing organization.

She's also an incredible muralist who has done more than 500 murals around our city.

Before "The NEXT Movement," she developed an incredible mural at Indian Creek MARTA Station, and it's called, "Enroute."

(mellow jazz music) - [Melissa] We are in Atlanta, Georgia at the MARTA Station, the Indian Creek Station, where all the magic happens.

When I created this mural for the MARTA station, I really wanted something that would inspire people to keep moving.

I like to let people know they can keep their head up no matter what.

And that's why I choose to mix bright colors with music and all the kinds of things that make you say, "You know what?

I feel better today because of this piece."

And so if you look at it here, I have the piano.

I have it almost pointing in the direction of the station, telling people that no matter what, you can keep it moving.

Being a part of "The NEXT Movement" was something that was almost symbolic of what I've been doing my whole life.

Even when I look at this piece that I created behind me, I realize that I couldn't do it alone.

So I had to collaborate with local artists.

You can't do this life alone.

You're gonna need somebody.

And so "The NEXT Movement" urges artists to band together for a greater cost to let other people know that you're stronger when you're together.

I'm Melissa Mitchell, and this is "The NEXT Movement."

- [Faith] So the day that we were here for the actual production of the film was really surreal.

I mean, again, this is an idea that we had sat around at our kitchen tables, kind of conceiving.

Seemed like a crazy idea when we first started it.

And then over time, as the artists came on board, as MARTA lent their sort of perspective to the vision, it started really taking root and taking hold.

- Nobody has ever asked us to film music on a train before, and so this is a really cool project for that reason.

To see this come together is so exciting.

- Next performing for us is CC Sunchild.

CC Sunchild is one of the most talented musicians I've ever had the luxury of hearing.

And she is ours.

She's right here in and from Atlanta.

She has performed with some of the most famous artists around the world, and she herself is now on that trajectory to stardom.

She has done a beautiful piece for "The NEXT Movement" that is all about just elevating our vibration and being in a space of love.

And this is understandably known as "La Dee Dah."

(keyboard playing) (keyboard playing) (keyboard playing) (keyboard playing) ♪ The other day, I took the time to stop and think ♪ ♪ How my life has changed ♪ And even though I had my share of bad times ♪ ♪ Somehow my charm won't fade away ♪ ♪ My heart sings la dee dah (hums) ♪ What a beautiful day (hums) ♪ What a beautiful way that it is ♪ ♪ Sometimes my days get so messed up it seems ♪ ♪ Like everything comes falling down ♪ (scat sings) ♪ But I'd never felt so something good to pick me up ♪ ♪ And turn my whole world round ♪ ♪ My heart sings la dee dah (scat sings) ♪ What a beautiful day (scat sings) ♪ What a beautiful way that it is ♪ ♪ Life has its ups and downs ♪ It spins you round and round ♪ Stand your ground, yeah ♪ Yeah, yeah ♪ If your life seems depressing ♪ ♪ Just count your many blessings ♪ ♪ Turn that frown upside down ♪ And keep singing la dee dah (scat sings) ♪ What a beautiful day ♪ Keep on singing la dee dah (scat sings) ♪ What a beautiful day ♪ Sing it with me, la dee dah, yeah ♪ (scat sings) ♪ What a beautiful day ♪ You can make a new day, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ It's gonna be all right, yeah, yeah ♪ ♪ What a beautiful day, yeah ♪ Oh yeah (hums) ♪ What a beau... beau... (scat sings) ♪ What a beautiful day ♪ La dee dah ♪ What a beautiful day ♪ La dee dah ♪ What a beautiful... day ♪ Sing it with me, la dee dah ♪ La dee dah ♪ What a beautiful day ♪ La dee dah ♪ La dee dah ♪ What a beaut, oh yeah ♪ What a beautiful ♪ Keep on singing la dee dah, yeah ♪ (scat sings) ♪ What a beautiful day ♪ Oh la la la dee dah ♪ La dee dah, yeah, yeah ♪ What a beautiful day... - I think what we love most about this project is the ability to collaborate with MARTA, allows us to sort of have this sort of democratization of art.

So it is art that is not, you know, siphoned away in any corner or silo.

It is art that anyone can have access to.

And being able to bring the power of artistry to anyone in our city, I think, is really incredible.

It's what MARTA Art Bound does every day, and it's what we get to do to build on that.

We were able to launch, with MARTA's support and with the support of the City of Atlanta, a series of digital poster photography that was throughout the city.

Thanks to an incredible photographer by the name of Steve West, we were able to partner with him and do some powerful portraits of each of the artists alongside with really compelling messages of hope and inspiration about this moment that we're living in and how we get to next.

And so if you got to any MARTA Station in the city, you look to your left, you look to your right, you would see one of these digital billboards showcasing this effort.

(upbeat music) There is a very real possibility this will continue to grow.

We'd love to be able to do season two and season three, being able to highlight more and more artists.

- I think the partnership with NEXT is really open-ended.

I mean, the sky is sort of the limit.

NEXT is continuously finding new people.

We need to find new people and bring them to our audiences.

So really it could be a partnership for the ages.

(upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music) (upbeat jazz music)