Tyler Andrew Lackey

Tyler Andrew Lackey (Social Practice M.A., ‘24) is an artist from Chattanooga, Tennesse who centers his work on the creation and utilization of sounds to respond to and reclaim the complexities surrounding race and caste, both in the United States and internationally. In his unique performance style, Tyler encourages active participation in the music-making process, challenging the conventional perception of performers as entertainers and fostering a fluid dynamic between creator and audience. Experimenting with visual projections, paintings, prompt engineering, natural materials, and Book Arts, Tyler delves into themes such as Afrofuturism, racism, urbanism, sustainability, and globalism. In these visual and conceptual forms, the overarching goal is to guide observers in constructing a reimagined past, present, or future.

Tyler’s thesis project, Echoes of Tomorrow: Reverberations, engages with mediums of space curation and collaborative gestures in the music-making process for performance using innovative instruments and sounds based in Black lived and imagined experiences. Through a music based non-linear practice of reflection, improvisation, and reclamation, participants are encouraged to face the violent systems and transmute them into sources of joy, materializing as vibrations that bring about a literal and metaphorical transformation of the atmosphere. This spiritual exploration unveils the profound capacity of art to act as a beacon of joy, a portal to a different dimension, even amidst challenging environments.