Welcome to our fifth podcast for the year 2010. For the month of June 2010, we are celebrating our newest exhibition, Soul Revival: A Poetic and Visual Experience of Renewal. The exhibition is on view at Meroe Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland until August 1, 2010.

This exciting exhibition features emerging artists and poets based the DC/Baltimore Metropolitan area on the theme of “Soul Revival.” What do we mean by revival? We are speaking of revival of the soul, spirit, neighborhood, community, nation, and even the world. The result is a eclectic visual range of artistic expression, ranging from realism to abstract and everything in between! Selected works of from the artists work has been paired with a poet/ spoken word artist who developed a poem that expresses their view about the art. Their contributions are an integral part of the exhibition, resulting in an innovative creative representation from a variety of artists–literary and visual– of the meaning of Soul Revival. During this podcast, which is part one of a two part series on the exhibition, we talked to two participants of this exhibition Nijla Mu’min and Alan King.

Image: Nijla Mu’min

Nijla Baseema Mu’min is a writer, filmmaker, and photographer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley where she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mass Communications in 2007. She attended Howard University’s MFA Film Program. In 2006, she founded Sweet Potato Pie Productions, a production company specializing in the creation of narrative films, documentaries, and photography that examine the most intimate details of the human condition. Her photography was featured at the Harvard Kennedy School’s “Beauty, Diversity, and Strength” Photo Exhibition. She was also selected as an interviewer for Spike Lee’s “Refresh the World” Symposium in January 2009. She is the recipient of the 2009 Paul Robeson Award for Best Feature Screenplay, and her writing is to be featured in the forthcoming Girlchild Press Anthology, “Woman’s Work: The Short Stories.”

Image: “Learners”, silver gelatin print, Nijla Mu’min

Nijla has written and directed numerous film and video projects. She is currently working on a documentary entitled “BACK UP! concrete diaries,” that explores how women deal with street harassment. Her most recent venture is the conception and development of a feature length screenplay, entitled Salaam.

Image: Alan King

Alan King’s poems have appeared in Alehouse, Audience, Boxcar Poetry Review, Indiana Review, MiPoesias and RATTLE, among others. A Cave Canem fellow and VONA Alum, he’s been nominated for both a Best of the Net selection and Pushcart Prize. When he’s not reporting or sending poems to journals, you can find Alan chasing the muse through Washington, D.C. — people watching with his boys and laughing at the crazy things strangers say to get close to one another.

Alan wrote The Cave in response to the mixed media collage, “Believe” by Sharon Burton as part of Soul Revival.

You can check out our conversation by clicking the podcast player to the right column of this blog or download the mp3.