Zamya Watkins likes to do her research about African American history. An eleventh-grade student at Boston Arts Academy, she has felt a strong passion to appreciate her own history. With younger siblings, she also feels a responsibility to teach them Black history. And at school, she shared her knowledge with others when working on group history projects.
Now, alongside the New England premiere of a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” Watkins will share with the public her artistic expression of the civil rights leader’s legacy in a multimedia exhibit at The Strand Theatre.
Concertgoers can see her and her classmates before, during, and after the performance on Fri., June 17, in the reception spaces of the historic vaudeville palace.
Thanks to the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts, Gallery X is an installation of original student work inspired by the history and legacy of African American religious leader and civil rights activist Malcolm X.
A partnership with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Castle of Our Skins, the art will be exhibited just blocks from Malcolm X’s one-time home on Dale Street in Roxbury.
“It felt like a really good opportunity to get in touch with young creatives,” said Taylor Lena McTootle, director of education for Castle of Our Skins. “Not only engaging with the basic facts, but engaging with the spirit of who he was.”
The motivation behind Gallery X was to have it be student-led, according to McTootle. Her organization, a Boston-based, Black-led chamber music ensemble, coordinated working with approximately 12 vocal students and 20 dance students.
“It’s not just understanding, evaluating, but at the end you have to create something,” McTootle said.
A video installation of the Boston students’ performative work will project from floor to ceiling at the end of The Strand’s lobby. The vocalists created a musical harmony out of poetry inspired by Malcolm X which can be listened to with headphones.
Friday will mark the first in a run of performances and recordings happening over five years with the series “As Told By: History, Race, and Justice on the Opera Stage,” by the Boston Modern Opera Project. Each portrays a figure of Black liberation in the past 250 years.
“It’s operas about Black historical figures by Black composers,” McTootle said, “and wanting young people in the Boston area to really be a part of that history.”
She said she picked up the Malcolm X autobiography in eighth grade (by her own volition.
Adrienne Hawkins, a dance instructor for the initiative, worked with students this past spring to create the performance that appears in the video installation.
“It wasn’t a dance about Malcolm X,” said Hawkins, who said she attended the August 1963 March on Washington as a child. “But doing a video with movement, his speech, and a historical perspective.”
Just like the students, the gallery curators also appreciated more of the civil rights leader’s legacy. McTootle said she loved the sentence starter “Malcom X would have been …” because it showed his potential had he not been assassinated in 1965.
Ashleigh Gordon, director of Castle of Our Skins, thought of his mother, an activist from the Caribbean Island of Grenada. “The lineage of power and strength from which he came,” Gordon said, “to see that there is a continuation of that lineage through Boston Arts Academy students … was really affirming for me.”
The audience will have the chance to engage with sentence starters as well. The opera series is called “As Told By …” McTootle said, an intentional syntax choice for the story of “Malcolm X as told by Boston, as told by BAA students, as told by you.”
Watkins, who is Black, studies dance at the arts high school in Dorchester. Creating the final product with her classmates, they all drew inspiration from the depiction of African American youth as “ghetto Black kids” during the time Malcolm X was alive.
“To represent what they used to call us, we did what we thought in our minds as ‘ghetto Black kids’ would do, and we put that in the dance to really show the aspects of what happened during the time that he was here,” Watkins said.
For her, Gallery X was a refreshing kind of history education.
“It was really important for me to do this because I wanted to express my history not only through poster boards, not only through slideshows, but through my art,” Watkins said. “Instead of doing a poem, or doing a writing or essay, we did a dance.”
