In the Art Restart podcast and salon series, the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts explore how creatives around the world are reinventing their fields and building a new landscape for the arts. The podcast can be streamed on Apple, Spotify or your listening platform of choice, and captioned interviews are available on YouTube.
On Super Bowl Sunday of 2019, Hannah Drake, who had long written about politics, feminism and race, reached a new level of fame when film director and producer Ava DuVernay, to protest the NFL’s treatment of quarterback-turned-activist Colin Kaepernick, tweeted out a video of Hannah’s poem “All You Had to Do Was Play the Game, Boy.” Kaepernick in turn shared the poem with his followers, and in short order Hannah’s words reached 2.4 million viewers. In this interview with Rob Kramer and Pier Carlo Talenti, conducted just a few days before the first portion of the (Un)Known Project was to be unveiled on the banks of the Ohio River, Hannah celebrates the power of art to instigate powerful social change and explains why she pushes through discomfort and fear to stand up for her art and her community.
For more information, visit the Art Restart website, or click below to listen.