Amanda Charnley and Naisha Solomon
The COVID-19 Community Care Mixtape is a collectively made compilation and pedagogical listening experience that explores music’s age-old capacity for healing and resistance. Art + Education graduate students Naisha Solomon and Amanda Charnley curated a mixtape of sounds and songs as part of a pedagogical album experience —complete with a listening companion guide with artwork and liner notes— designed to promote care and further decolonial inquiry and action during this pandemic. The project’s title pays tribute to the arts of mixtaping and deejaying innovated by New York City hip-hop musicians. Mixtapes have been made for decades not only promotionally but also informally between friends, crafted with care and attention to detail. 
The songs were collected with the help of musicians, artists, educators, sound healers, and friends in Naisha and Amanda’s immediate communities. The mixtape seeks to amplify artists of color and queer artists, among other marginalized identities, in defiance of colonialism’s methods of privileging white, male heteronormativity. The mixtape includes a variety of genres, including spoken word, samba reggae, calypso, hip-hop, field recordings, ambient sounds, etc, and sounds of healing and justice that resonates at this moment. 
Listeners are encouraged to utilize this material in a variety of ways, including as a meditative “sound bath” experience or the soundtrack for a “listening party,” and to explore the artists on this compilation in greater detail. To encourage further inquiry and assist in listening, more information on some of the mixtape songs and influences can be found in an accompanying companion guide. Naisha and Amanda hope that the mixtape acts as a catalyst for listeners: “We intended the mixtape to serve as a digital sound sanctuary and hope you’ll discover something that soothes, strengthens, or invigorates you and inspires you to take action toward self and collective care.”
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