Prayer to the Iyami touches on themes including resistance, healing, metaphor and mysticism. Cullors used her older brother Monte’s clothes to build a tapestry forming the shape of wings. She carried these 20-pound wings as a marker of the 20-year fight to keep her brother free from incarceration and abuse, leading audiences in a ceremonial procession toward empathy and awakening. The score features James Baldwin speaking about the American Negro crisis interwoven with Cullors’ voice as she reads the Yes on R ballot measure in California, which Cullors founded and chaired, and helped pass on March 3, 2020. The ballot measure gives subpoena power to the Los Angeles’s Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission and funds research into community-based alternatives to L.A. County’s jail expansion.
Shana Nys Dambrot, LA Weekly; Reed Dunlea, Rolling Stone