Project description “…Or does it explode?” is a collaborative artwork with Dread Scott and “at risk” youth in Philadelphia. The project is commissioned and coordinated by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and Philadelphia Mural Arts Advocates, a Philadelphia nonprofit corporation. It will be an outdoor public artwork in that consists of a collection of human scale full body photographic portraits of the teenagers in illuminated lightboxes. The boxes will be supplemented by an audio component. The photographs in lightboxes will be parallel to the ground and by their placement and arrangement they will reference graves. But unlike graves, which connote finality and death, these images, will be full of life. They will be emitting light and the people in the photographs will be smiling. The work will be sited in a prominent location in the city. The audio will enable each photograph to “speak.” It will consist of carefully edited interviews with the youths about their hopes for the future. I envision that some of the hopes will be personal and that some will be more public and contemplating larger social questions (i.e. I wish I could have a new Lexus, I wish I would have a nice job and be able to raise a couple of kids in a nice neighborhood, I wish I could live to be 40, I wish there wasn’t so much racism and that people could get along better. I wish that my brother didn’t join the army and that we wouldn’t have wars.). The light boxes and mural will be a semi-permanent work of art, which will remain on view from one to five years. The soundscape, together with the upbeat photographs will contrast sharply with the very untraditional display on the ground. This contradiction between images of teen-agers full of life, speaking about their dreams and the display in a grave-like manner will encourage the audience to see the youth as beautiful and deserving a bright future as well as the killing and suffocating life that is forced upon them. The title for this project “…Or does it explode?” is taken from the last line from Langston Hughes’ classic poem “Harlem” (which begins, “What happens do a dream deferred”).