American Realities: For Freedoms Town Hall presents Maurice Tyree

Self-Revolution: Art, Transformation, and Community an evening of dialogue with Maurice Tyree, moderated by Dr. Katie Singer

Self-Revolution: Art, Transformation, and Community is an evening of dialogue with DC-based writer and artist Maurice Tyree, whose practice explores the radical potential of art as transformation and liberation. Through writing, visual art, and community engagement, Tyree will share what he calls metamorphosis — the ongoing process of turning struggle into creativity, and creativity into connection.

Moderated by scholar and co-author Dr. Katie Singer, the event will open with a short reading by Tyree from the duo’s book The Darkest Parts of My Blackness: A Journey of Remorse, Reform, Reconciliation, and (R)evolution. As part of American Realities: For Freedoms Town Halls, this event positions Tyree’s self-revolution both as an individual journey and a shared inquiry into the civic role of art, exploring questions: How does personal history shape creativity and civic belonging? How can aesthetic practice reimagine civic participation in the face of incarceration, racism, and systemic inequity? And how might art itself serve as a praxis of liberation and repair?

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Maurice Tyree is a native of Washington, DC. At the age of 27 he was convicted of M**der. While incarcerated, Tyree worked to transform himself and now works to share his story while continuing his journey of self-improvement and activism as a writer, artist, and public speaker. He is the author of The Darkest Parts of My Blackness: A Journey of Remorse, Reform, Reconciliation, and (R)evolution. Tyree is also a member of Washington DC’s Commission on Reentry and Returning Citizens Affairs in coordination with the Mayor's Office on Returning Citizen Affairs (MORCA).

Katie Singer has a Ph.D. in American Studies and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Over the last 20 years she has taught writing, literature, history, and African-American studies. She relocated to California in 2020 where she is presently coaching boxing while working on her next book project on the Los Angeles Great Migration era. Her book, Alien Soil: Oral Histories of Great Migration Newark was published in August of 2024. She has also co-authored the memoir of previously incarcerated writer Maurice Tyree, entitled The Darkest Parts of My Blackness: A Journey of Remorse, Reform, Reconciliation, and (R)evolution.

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The second year of the For Freedoms residency, produced by the Corcoran/National Gallery partnership, unfolds as a Civic Arts Lab, an active space for civic and cultural inquiry and collective experimentation.

The For Freedoms Civic Art Lab presents American Realities: For Freedoms Town Halls, a series of artist-led conversations that interrogate the distance between American myth and lived experience. These Town Halls situate personal histories and collective struggles within the broader field of cultural production, asking how art can both reveal the fault lines of democracy and imagine more inclusive modes of civic belonging. 

From Nekisha Durrett’s sculptural excavations of public memory, to Maurice Tyree’s The Darkest Parts of My Blackness, an intimate reckoning with trauma and transformation; from Corinne Botz’s Milk Factory, an embodied study of reproductive labor and the architectures of care, to Marina Berio’s Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President, a meditation on legacy, racialized violence, and the language of images — each project destabilizes dominant narratives to foreground truths of the American and human experience. Together, these practices query the tension between America’s aspirational promises and its material realities, positioning art as both mirror and intervention while reorienting our sense of what a just and plural future might look like. The series opens space for inquiry, dialogue, and collective reflection, underscoring storytelling as a mode of repair and a catalyst for reimagining the possible.

Host or Publisher The Corcoran School of the Arts & Design at The George Washington University