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.