This past July, local multi-hyphenate creative Zahir Muhammad was talking to his friend and frequent collaborator Ugonna “Ugo” Njoku, director of the Social Boot documentary, about an oft-discussed but never-exhausted topic among their ilk: underground creativity in Baton Rouge.
Two years Njoku’s junior, 19-year-old Muhammad admires how the young director has been able to turn an ambition—in this case, a filmatic exploration of racial disparities in Louisiana health care and the social and cultural waves that reverberate from them—into a reality. That conversation in July 2021 got him thinking about the power of his own ideas and what they could do for the community.
At the time, he says he had a word in mind: “platform.” After one year at LSU and, before that, a long history of commuting back and forth from his hometown of Washington, D.C., to visit friends and family in Baton Rouge, Muhammad has developed a strong familiarity with the community of thriving young creatives that call the Red Stick home.
So, he endeavored to construct a platform on which that community could ascend to the national—even international—spotlight.
“Just as my friends from Atlanta or Los Angeles or New York get international recognition for being who they are and being cool and talented, there are people just as talented here that never get the light of day, because they’re from Baton Rouge,” Muhammad says. “These people are so cool, and they deserve to be recognized.”
That platform is Project Innovate Studios, a creative collective and “incubator for ideas,” as he and his team call it, that exists to collect and disseminate the works of Baton Rouge creatives throughout the world. It comprises a 14-member committee of artists, musicians, designers and manifold other young creatives, many from Baton Rouge—like visual artist Orlando “Osha” Burks Jr. and seamstress and designer Shae Sanchez-Moore—while others hail from as far as Melbourne, Australia, and London, England.
But aside from promoting the work of its immediate committee, Zahir says Project Innovate also strives to inspire and empower unrecognized creative talent. As part of the rollout for the group’s fall 2022 debut, Zahir and his team put together iNNOVATE Magazine, an introduction to the organization, its members and its mission. “Through Project Innovate, we hope to reach that little artist in his or her hometown who doesn’t think they are cool enough to express themselves,” the magazine reads. “Because at some point, each of us was that little artist.”
Muhammad says empowering expression is the bedrock of Project Innovate’s M.O. Having traveled extensively and made numerous connections in creative hubs like Atlanta and Los Angeles, he’s painfully aware that the supposed creative elite tends to look down its nose at anyone from Baton Rouge. But he refuses to let that elitism stifle the brilliant local creatives whom he’d readily place on par with anyone belonging to that supposed elite.
Crucially, Muhammad stresses that the trick to elevating the Capital City creative underground to the level it deserves is not in mimicking the cities that claim star status in the artistic world but rather in demanding recognition for the creative hub it already is. That’s the macro level. On the micro, this means encouraging the aspiring creatives in this city to be themselves—and to know that being yourself as a Baton Rougean is just as cool as doing so as a person from Atlanta, a Los Angeles or New York.
“It’s empowering,” he says. “It’s taking our energy and putting it out into the world as an empowering source to where others can take it as an example and say, ‘ok, well, I can be myself too … and I can inspire others by being myself.’”
