Performance | C.R.E.A.M.: An Afternoon of Performances and Poetry

C.R.E.A.M. is a multidisciplinary event featuring music, performances, and readings inspired by Wu-Tang Clan’s 1993 song “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me)." The event features newly commissioned performances by
Jibade-Khalil Huffman and Simone White, Devin Kenny, and Bonita Oliver, as well as poetry readings by A. H. Jerriod Avant and Sable Elyse Smith.

C.R.E.A.M., curated by artist Sable Elyse Smith, is an extension of Smith’s sculpture of the same name, exhibited on the High Line through March 2019 as part of the group exhibition Agora. The sculpture takes the shape of an altered replica of the Hollywood Sign. In her version, the sign reads "IRONWOODLAND"—a reference to the Ironwood State Prison and to “Hollywoodland,” the segregated real estate development advertised in the original sign. The piece draws attention to the fraught connections between institutions that develop real estate and those that fund and support prisons.

Mirroring her embrace of the varying creative and structural capacities of language, music, and sculpture, Smith invited a group of artists, poets, and musicians to present new or existing work that dismantles and reimagines “C.R.E.A.M.” as a song and as a larger cultural moment. “C.R.E.A.M.”’s lyrics describe the ways that racist economic systems in the US act upon and through Black bodies. With this starting point, the event’s contributors interrogate mass incarceration but resist the simplistic narratives of statistics, criminality, and race. Instead, they attend to the complexities of the carceral state and the specificities of its effects on our individual lives and our culture at large.

Devin Kenny opens the event with a musical performance that looks at the history of influences that led to “C.R.E.A.M.” and those that came after; Jibade-Khalil Huffman and Simone White present a new, multimedia collaborative performance; Bonita Oliver realizes a new vocal performance; A. H. Jerriod Avant reads new and existing poems that connect to the larger themes at hand; and Smith reads some of her own writing.