Overview
From September 20 to October 12, 2014, Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center presented Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, a walkable month-long art exhibition of four community-based art commissions by Xenobia Bailey, Simone Leigh, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Bradford Young. Black Radical Brooklyn launched from the site of Weeksville, a Brooklyn community established by free and formerly enslaved Black citizens 11 years after abolition in New York State. Black Radical Brooklyn drew inspiration not only from this story–achieving self-determination through the claiming and holding of a neighborhood–but also from radical local battles for land and dignity from the 1960s to today.
As part of Creative Time’s exhibition “Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn,” a collaboration with Weeksville Heritage Center, Creative Time Reports is featuring essays related to the history of African-American struggles for self-determination in Brooklyn.
