Surfacing: Let's Go Over

On March 30, 2026, Fred Moten and Brandon López bring "Surfacing: Let’s Go Over," a performance and activation, to JazzUrbane Cafe.

Note: This event is now sold out. To provide an intimate experience, we are capping attendance at 100 tickets. Admission is first-come, first-served. RSVP does not guarantee entry. Tickets may be available at the door, subject to capacity.

Moten and López's explicitly political sonic performance practice opens channels through which we imagine beyond and above what confronts us. Moten’s poetics, intoned through a deep consideration of Black vocal performance and musicianship, alongside Lopez’s rooting instrumentation, call the audience into a collective space of inquiry, feeling, and transformation.

Fred Moten creates new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. Brandon López works at the fringes of contemporary music through his compositions and improvisation.

This performance-lecture, hosted by Nia K. Evans and Kris Manjapra, marks the launch of a new Scholars for Social Justice series: Boston Open University: What Belongs to Community and What Universities Owe Us.

About Boston Open University

True community-rooted sources of value, wealth, and knowledge make it possible to ‘get over’, ‘go over’, ‘get around’, and ‘get through.’ These bases are constantly under threat, from administrations and state apparatuses, and often from universities which seek to capture and enclose them. Scholars for Social Justice, in collaboration with the Boston Ujima Project and other partners, offers the Boston Open University series to ‘surface’ what knowledge emerges from our communities, what our universities owe to our communities, and how we can learn together outside of closed structures of oppression and domination.

Co-Sponsors

Scholars for Social Justice | Boston Ujima Project, Inc. | Social Action Lab at Northeastern University | Freedom School at Harvard University | Black History in Action