For three and a half years, I ran Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn while dealing with issues of precarity.
Weeksville Heritage Center
Posted inNews
A Heritage Center for Black History in Brooklyn Struggles to Remain Open
The museum, which preserves the history of one of the first free Black communities in New York, says that if a new crowdfunding campaign does not yield $200,000 before July, it will be forced to shut its doors for lack of resources.
Posted inArt
A Famous Anti-Slavery Speech Finds New Life in Brooklyn
“A Time for Seditious Speech” aims to show that speech can serve as a call to direct action, sometimes even violence.
Posted inArt
Funk, Medicine, and Questions of the Future
In performance, as in history, there’s a lot that gets lost: layers of meaning and nuance too complex to carry in a single story. Investigating Simone Leigh’s and Xenobia Bailey’s projects for funkgodjazz&medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, produced by Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center, I was struck by this loss as an informative process.
Posted inArt
Rediscovering the Roots of Black Radical Brooklyn
The energetic, jumbled print design of funkgodjazz&medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, an exhibition by Creative Time and the Weeksville Heritage Center, strikes a bright, funkedelic chord in the mind’s eye. This is jazz; this is the casting off of the master’s linguistic tools; this is a celebration of black selfhood.