Damon Locks will perform his new solo work List of Demands live at Berlin. Locks is a Chicago-based visual artist, educator, and vocalist/musician whose decades-long resume connects the dots between experimental improvisation, sample-based hip-hop, punk, and poetry. List of Demands, his most recent project, was released in January via International Anthem Recording Company. The album lays out a vision of Black liberation and transmits it outward as a song cycle of bite-sized MF DOOM-meets-Nikki Giovanni rhythm experiments.

The performance will start at 8 p.m., so please arrive early to get settled in and enjoy refreshments.

Damon Locks is a highly respected Chicago-based visual artist, educator, and vocalist/musician. He leads the Black Monument Ensemble; is a member of New Future City Radio and Rob Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra; and co-founded the bands the Eternals and Trenchmouth.

Locks received his BFA in fine arts from the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 2014, he has been teaching art through the Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. He spent four years as an artist in residence as a part of the Museum of Contemporary Arts’ SPACE Program, introducing civically engaged art into the curriculum at Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy High School. He teaches improvisation in the sound department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Locks is a highly decorated artist. He received a Helen Coburn Meier and Tim Meier Achievement Award in the Arts in 2015. In 2017, he became a Soros Justice Media Fellow. In 2019, he became a 3Arts Awardee, and he is a 2025 recipient of the Creative Capital Award.