“In the world I dream of, we see ourselves and love what we see. We see ourselves and see possibility. We see each other without judging each other. We see each other and come together. This is the world I create in words, images, sounds, and ideas. This is my work.”
Greg Osei has always found himself breaking down barriers, between people, between concepts, between genres, between creative media, and perhaps most importantly between the parts of ourselves. From his upbringing as a Massachusetts-born child of Ghanaian immigrants to his years living in Latin America, his experience has pushed him to see the beauty that lies at the intersection of seemingly different ideas and experiences.
As a singer-songwriter-producer and interdisciplinary artist, he is known for soulful vocals, healing performances, breathtaking visuals, and multi-genre music with Afrocosmopolitan flair. This was exemplified by his single “Searching for Wonder” and its accompanying music video, which screened at a number of film festivals worldwide including the prestigious New Orleans Film Festival and the Indie Memphis Film Festival. The dance music film highlights the connection that black people can find within to their ancestral pasts and their transformative futures. At the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, he performed in interactive pieces by a number of artists including Yoko Ono, Lygia Clark, and Anne Imhof. With fellow artist Tina Colón, he also performed a concept show, Latin Soul [redefined], which searched for new intersections between Latin and soul music traditions. His collaborations with former Martha Graham dancer Abdiel Jacobsen, The Color Iz and A Walk in My Heels, disrupted binary frameworks, challenging the boundaries between concepts like dance and music, male and female, leader and follower.
In the face of the uncertainty of the 2020 pandemic, Greg was inspired to write and produce music that encouraged dance and movement, celebrated love and connection, and engendered community. He built a home studio during lockdown, and the result was love alive, a concept album about choosing love in spite of immense fear, particularly on the margins of society. Drawing on his own experiences, reflections, and social justice convictions, Greg crafted an album that was both personal and universal, profound and just plain fun. Rooted in r&b/soul, the project reflects Greg’s expansive musical influences like dancehall, afropop, house, synth funk, dance pop, and gospel. love alive captures an exciting moment of redefinition for Greg in which he finds himself at his most authentically expressed, sharing varying facets of his identity, from his passionate sensuality and raucous playfulness to his deep spirituality and confessional storytelling. More than ever before, Greg’s artistry is an invitation to revel in our own exquisite complexity.
“All the things that have traditionally been pitted against each other, in either/or binaries, I don’t see that way because I have seen all of those things come together in me, so I know it’s possible for them to be in constructive conversation with each other. That’s what I’m about. Bringing people and experiences together. Not by erasing their uniqueness, but by playing with space and with boundaries, merging them, placing them side by side, or just laying them bare for us all to see.”