Lincoln Portrait
An original multi-genre musical created in collaboration with
incarcerated composers.
Lincoln Portrait is an original multi-genre musical created through Decoda's long-term
songwriting partnership with Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina. The musical
itself was conceived during songwriting residencies in 2017 and 2018, bringing together
incarcerated composers and professional musicians to create an original score inspired
by the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln. Blending spoken word, hip-hop, folk, rock,
R&B, and classical music, the work explores enduring questions of freedom,
democracy, justice, and belonging through a distinctly contemporary musical language.
Supported by recent funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the
University of South Carolina, the project has entered a new chapter. Nearly a decade
after the musical was first conceived, many of the original collaborators are returning to
the score they created, joining new artistic partners in an intensive period of historical
research and creative development ahead of a workshop premiere.
As the work has evolved, it has become less a musical about Abraham Lincoln and
more a conversation among Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the contemporary voices
of the incarcerated composers who created the score. Returning to the project nearly a
decade after it was first conceived has prompted the collaborators to ask new historical
questions—about leadership, democracy, emancipation, citizenship, and the unfinished
work of American history—that continue to resonate today. Rather than offering simple
answers, Lincoln Portrait invites audiences into an ongoing dialogue between the past
and the present.
The next chapter of Lincoln Portrait will bring the work into its public life through a
workshop premiere, a national tour, a professional recording, a documentary film, and
educational residencies. Just as importantly, it will return to the correctional community
where it began while engaging audiences in concert halls, universities, museums,
correctional institutions, and civic spaces across the country.
At its heart, Lincoln Portrait is a story about returning—to collaborators, to history, and
to one another. Through long-term artistic partnership and shared authorship, the
project explores how music can create new spaces for dialogue across differences of
experience, profession, and circumstance, asking not only what Lincoln's legacy means
today, but what his unfinished ideals continue to ask of us.
