Armed with just a microphone and a single question, Cincinnati musician Brandon Isaac walked the hallways of Aiken High School and asked students to tell him the story of their high school hallway. Those honest answers and hallway confessions eventually became a full rap album and book, now on public display at the Contemporary Arts Center in downtown Cincinnati.
Isaac's project, which he built from conversations recorded with students and later turned into music at his home studio in College Hill, is the kind of story that started small and grew into something much bigger, according to WCPO 9 Cincinnati. Isaac said he hopes the project shows a different side of young people in Cincinnati, telling the station that young people have more to say than many people give them credit for.
One of those students, 17-year-old Englyn Logan, ended up doing more than just talking into Isaac's microphone. Logan, who attends Aiken High School, drew the artwork that Isaac selected as the cover for his new album. Her drawing depicts her home with smoke billowing from the chimney and a girl walking toward the street, an image Logan said represents herself and the emotion exploding inside her house.
From Hallway Interviews to a Downtown Exhibit
The album and its artwork are now displayed at the Contemporary Arts Center as part of the project, with the museum showing Logan's piece alongside the rest of the work until September 27, 2026. The exhibition sits inside ArtsWave's 2026 Truth & Inspiration Showcase, which runs free to the public from July 18 through September 27 at the center's downtown location on East 6th Street, according to the Contemporary Arts Center. Founded in 1939, the center is one of the first institutions in the country dedicated to contemporary art and continues to offer free general admission.
The project, titled Pride in My Heritage, received funding through ArtsWave's 2026 Inspire Artist Grants program, which distributed $204,700 across 24 local Cincinnati artists in December 2025, per ArtsWave. Since the grants program began in 2020, ArtsWave has invested more than $1 million into Cincinnati-area artists working on community-centered projects focused on equity and BIPOC arts and culture, according to the same source.
A Nonprofit's Role in Getting Students Talking
Isaac's access to Aiken's hallways didn't happen by chance. Beyond his work as an independent musician, he serves as Director of Narrative & Storytelling at WordPlay Cincy, the nonprofit storytelling organization that facilitated his connection to students there, per the Poetry Foundation. WordPlay Cincy, founded in 2012 in Cincinnati's Northside neighborhood, runs free creative writing and arts programs where more than 90% of youth participants come from low-income backgrounds and over 70% identify as BIPOC, the Poetry Foundation reports.
The organization maintains an ongoing partnership with Aiken called The Writers' Room, which places WordPlay staff into 7th-through-12th grade humanities classrooms to run creative writing and oral storytelling workshops, the same report notes. That existing residency is what gave Isaac his opening to spend time in Aiken's hallways rather than making a one-time visit, and it's how the project came to include other student contributors from the school, including student artist Queen Mugeni alongside Logan, according to ArtsWave.
A School Named for a Music Pioneer
Aiken New Tech High School sits on Belmont Avenue in Cincinnati's College Hill neighborhood, where Isaac also happens to keep his home studio. The school originally opened in 1962, was rebuilt as a technology-focused high school in 2014, and now serves roughly 1,100 students in grades 7 through 12 within Cincinnati Public Schools, per Wikipedia.
The school's name carries its own connection to music education in the city. Aiken is named for Charles Aiken and his family, who together contributed 126 combined years to music education in Cincinnati Public Schools, with Charles becoming the district's first titled Superintendent of Music in 1871, according to Friends of Music Hall. More than a century and a half later, a hip-hop album built from student voices in that same building carries a version of that legacy forward.
For Isaac, the project ultimately came down to something simple. He described home as what matters most, and said the project documents the stories of the students themselves, according to WCPO 9 Cincinnati's report. For Logan, that meant putting her own house, and the emotion inside it, on an album cover now hanging in a downtown Cincinnati museum for anyone to see.
