This year’s festival art is anchored in Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” . A visual anthem of resilience, power, and joy. The aesthetic pulls from the bold lines of political poster art, the brilliance of Afrofuturist visionaries, and the lush imagination of artists like Kerry James Marshall and Mati Klarwein. Flowers  especially roses rise as symbols of beauty, protest, celebration, and mourning. They bloom as sound bursting from instruments, as threads weaving musicians together, as offerings of joy in defiance of silence. At the center: two hands rise up, cupped and open offering and receiving just like jazz itself, a prayer carried on rhythm. As current powers attempt Black erasure, this festival centers Black American music, where protest is joy, music is power, and gathering is resilience.