Kellen “Klassik” Abston: The Ark

Public Programs
KLASSROOM: Seeing Sounds with Kellen Abston
Saturday, September 13, 2025 – 10 am-12:30 pm
Saturday, October 4, 2025 – 10 am - 12:30 pm

As a multi-instrumentalist producer, singer, rapper and performance artist, I’ve built a 17-year career in my hometown of Milwaukee, WI blending the sounds of jazz, hip-hop, and soul into my own unique emotive blend. In the wake of the pandemic, having become increasingly disenchanted with the expectation of music performance as purely “entertainment,” I began to conceptualize a new way to present my work on stage and in sound. This past year, as I ruminated over what kind of artist I wanted to be post-pandemic, I settled on “Black Pastoral Sonic Landscape Painter” as a concept I am now seeking to further define and explore through residency work.

Deeply inspired by a revelatory fall 2020 trip to South Dakota, as well as my love for pastoral paintings (and visual art in general as a muse), the expansive landscapes on canvases and out in the natural world began to feel synesthetically connected to my desire to “paint” with my sounds and evoke similarly bucolic “artist-built environments.” My goal is to develop THE ARK, a self-contained touring performance art installation to be staged in contemporary art museums, black box theatres, and universities. In my mind, the installation would be comprised of my audio production rig set against multiple screens to form the rear of THE ARK, onto which pastoral imagery – forests, mountains, rivers, prairies, etc.– would be cast/projected and manipulated through effects, live and in conjunction with the musical performance. During this residency, I am immersing myself in different natural environments to serve as both muse and source material for THE ARK.

THE ARK explores my synesthetic relationship with visual art/video + sound. Moreover, it juxtaposes Black Music and performance against idyllic imagery from which Black people have been excluded and that is historically devoid of Blackness. How, through my sonic art and physical and visual performance, can I insert myself into the peaceful, serene, and expansive spirit of the natural world which my people have been disconnected? How and why is my art and performance informed by pastoral imagery? What does Black Joy and Freedom look like set amidst pastures of the likes of Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Cole, and how do the varying effects of opacity and transparency speak to the visibility of my own Blackness? How do I generate sonic “brushwork” with physical performance to evoke the same awe-inspiring natural wonders that inspire the music in the first place?

About the Artist

Kellen “Klassik” Abston, a self-described “Black Pastoral Sonic Landscape Painter,” is an award-winning Milwaukee-born-and-based musician, producer, songwriter, performing artist, and community curator. Named the City of Milwaukee's 2021 Mildred L. Harpole Artist of the Year, Klassik's jazz-saturated hip-hop/soul, informed by years of traditional jazz study and Milwaukee Public Schools arts education, has taken him from summer festival stages and crowds of thousands, to classroom settings inspiring youth of all ages throughout Wisconsin. His 2019 LP, QUIET, was named the #1 album of the year by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and was awarded Critic's Choice and Solo Artist honors at the 2019 Radio Milwaukee Music Awards. 2022 saw Klassik collaborating with both the Milwaukee Art Museum, producing the original composition and video performance Nobody's Watching, and Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, producing and performing an all-original score for their production of Brian Quijada’s Where Did We Sit on the Bus? In 2024, he again reprised the role of music director and performer with MCT for the season-opening retelling of Homer’s epic Iliad with An Iliad. A true "Klass Act,” Klassik works to stir the souls of listeners into action with empathy, passion, and purpose through his own vulnerable and self-reflective sonic art.