The Black Apostles: The Arkestra/UGMAA Ethos/Aesthetic: Music, Artists, and Community

Evolving through their everyday practice as community artists, they offered neither treatises nor manifestoes, but the straightforward example of lives animated by this purpose, leaving their imprint on the myriad individuals and community they embraced. The Arkestra and UGMAA demonstrated the essential role of the arts within the community, the importance of collective artistic endeavor, the wide range of artistic talent within a community, and how a collective movement brings out that talent within individuals, allowing it to flourish and develop. As such their most important contribution was not a product or a commodity, though their recorded and compositional legacy is significant, but a process of cultural production and development within and for their community.