Now through Aug. 9, five small Detroit arts organizations are vying for the Knight Arts Challenge People’s Choice Award, offering a $20,000 prize. Below, Sage Crump of nominee Complex Movements, an artist collective that expresses the connections between science and social justice through hip-hop, art-installations, interactive performance and technology,  talks about why the group should get your vote. To see the other nominees and to text to vote, visit knightarts.org/peopleschoice. 1. Why should your group win the People’s Choice Award?

In Detroit, this is a time of land grabs and displacement, school closings and voting rights being stripped by emergency management, to name a few of the crises we face. Detroit’s great art, music and social justice movements are under threat, but Complex Movements believes these legacies are still alive and well. After years of addressing these issues through community organizing and hip-hop, we decided to go a new direction and create Beware of the Dandelions. BotD is a Detroit story shaped by some of the many voices coming out of Detroit. It illuminates Detroit’s grassroots struggles for change through a super-hybrid of art installation, projection, technology, music, science-fiction parable, interactive performance and community workshops. It displays the innovation coming out of the city and has the potential to share it on an interplanetary scale.

2. What would you do with the $20,000 prize?

If we win the People’s Choice Award, the prize money would help amplify these stories of Detroit’s movements. It will bring us closer to realizing our full vision for this innovative project, and help us take it on the road to cross pollinate the stories of Detroit with other communities facing similar challenges. We spent the last month in residency at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum for African-American History developing a work-in-progress version in order to receive community feedback from Detroiters. Now we need time and space to incubate the piece and incorporate the lessons from that experience. Our vision is to grow Beware of the Dandelions into a creative community organizing project, an online and immersive video game and a mothership that transports imaginations to a future where holistic equity and justice is possible.

3. What excites you most about the creative momentum in Detroit? The creative momentum in Detroit is building upon a long legacy that has always existed, tracing back to the original people of this land. Detroiters have always been creative, not just as musicians and visual artists, but also as artists of change, transforming conditions for community survival out of necessity. Detroit is not a blank slate or an empty playground for foundations or venture capitalists. Rather, Detroit is a fertile ground that has always grown what some people once looked upon as weeds, but now realize are nutritional and medicinal. We are grateful for the shoulders we stand upon as well as those at our side as we continue to build upon that legacy. Through a combination of risk and rigor, Complex Movements aims to illuminate and evolve the lessons from the people and movements before us, as well as create space for new generations of Detroit visionaries to emerge.

To see all Knight Arts Challenge People’s Choice Award nominees and to learn how to vote, visit knightarts.org/peopleschoice.