“The Founding of Lionel Wilson College Preparatory Academy” uses fable and surrealism to interrogate the arrival of an elite charter school in a working-class neighborhood. The poem imagines this real event as a fantastical incursion—part Hogwarts, part corporate invasion—where childhood awe collides with socioeconomic trauma. The still image in the video shows my brother (a central figure in the poem) gazing at Matisse’s “Dance (I)” in the Museum of Modern Art. This image mirrors the poem’s closing scene and casts a visual echo across time: the child once “chosen” by the golden ticket, now standing before elite art in a bourgeois setting. It is a meditation on class, memory, and cycles of aspiration. The juxtaposition of voice, stillness, and ambient score invites the viewer to sit inside this tension—between beauty and brutality, enchantment and exclusion. By framing capitalist structures as magical systems, the piece critiques how institutions manufacture prestige by repackaging access as merit.
Director’s Note: This poem and video are both rooted in personal history: my oldest brother’s admittance into a prestigious charter school in early-2000s East Oakland, and my own childhood experience watching that event unfold. The still image—him at MoMA in 2019—creates a deliberate loop back to that genesis. The visual parallel between an elite museum and a charter school deepens the poem’s critique: both institutions are funded by wealth, both commodify exclusivity, and both promise salvation through admission. I sought to read the poem in the voice of a circus ringmaster, zealously selling his fantastical delights. Such was the feeling of being a child, and having a shiny new school with uniformed kids suddenly show up in your tucked-away block of ghetto, as if the sky had said, “Wake up from your poverty slumber—the circus is in town, it’s time to climb now.” I composed the ambient score myself: a simple piano refrain, synth pad for texture, and panning violin for detail. The resulting mood is equal parts childlike and elegiac, and the trance-like repetition underscores the poem’s ouroboric structure—how systems of prestige sustain themselves by cycling hope and hierarchy through generations.
