Art is a vital tool to champion Black heritage, spark necessary conversations, and create positive social change. Brooklyn Arts Council aims to empower our vast and talented network of Black artists as cultural mediators, experts, healers, and ambassadors to bring awareness to the systemic issues that impact Black communities, and create innovative, artistic, and justice-centered solutions across Brooklyn.
At BAC, we are committed to creating sustainable support for artists, investing in our borough’s extraordinary creative community, and advancing social and racial equity through our grants and programs. We continue to cultivate our Brooklyn Innovation Institute and Creative Equations Fund to empower artists of marginalized communities and create impactful arts experiences for neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID, including Sunset Park, Crown Heights, Brownsville, and East New York. These neighborhoods experience systematic poverty, subpar academic outcomes in public schools, high unemployment rates, devastating health issues, and a lack of cultural infrastructure in comparison to their surrounding neighborhoods. Access to arts and culture within neighborhoods helps mitigate some of these issues.
It’s thanks to Black artists and cultural practitioners that Brooklyn has long been celebrated for its diversity and dynamism. In this national month of recognition, we would like to highlight a few of the artists and organizations in our network championing Black culture and making our borough more vibrant.
Batingua Arts | Persephone DaCosta
Persephone DaCosta, Artistic Director of Batingua Arts, performing at BAC’s 2022 Grantee Celebration. Batingua Arts is a Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee. Photo by Will O’Hare.
Under Artistic Director Persephone DaCosta, Batingua Arts is a multicultural performing arts company dedicated to the preservation, education and celebration of traditional art forms. Batingua is unique in that it preserves traditional dances while simultaneously creating innovative dances using as a foundation arts from the African diaspora. Batingua reaches all audiences by drawing its material and expressing it through a variety of Afro-Caribbean rooted art forms.
Batingua recently launched “My Brooklyn, My Arts, My Voice,” a community arts and advocacy project that mentors, trains, and empowers Brooklyn youths to speak out about justice and equity through cultural performances. While their training is mainly in dance, students also participate in discussions on topics such as racism, violence, equity, justice, and how they impact their community and selves.
Chief Baba Neil Clarke
Chief Baba Neil Clarke, Creative Equations Fund grantee. Photo by H. King.
Chief Baba Neil Clarke is a highly respected, award-winning, and internationally noted culturally grounded percussionist, bandleader, producer, scholar, spiritualist, and educator. His involvement in African-centered percussive arts and his prolific professional music career span close to sixty years. Born, raised, and trained in Brooklyn, he’s studied with percussion masters throughout the African diaspora. This instilled in Chief Clarke a desire for his music to have social and political impact as well as artistic merit. Rooted in traditional spiritual practices, his overarching work seeks to create opportunities for cultivating an understanding and appreciation of the African drum with a purposeful intention of dispelling unproductive biases and stereotypical misconceptions.
Chief Clarke’s relationship with Brooklyn Arts Council goes back to his teenage years when he was encouraged in his artistry by BAC founder Charlene Victor.
Kiire Wellness | Oludaré Bernard
Oludaré Bernard, Founder of Kiire Wellness. Bernard is a Creative Equations Fund grantee. Photo by Amina El Kabbany.
Through performance and workshops, Kiire Wellness creates safe spaces for Black LGBT+ communities to explore African spiritual expression and wellness as a human right. Founded by Oludaré Bernard, Kiire Wellness aims to preserve ancestral wisdom, culture, and also the health and wellness of Black LGBT+ people who have to consistently fight for their right to breath and live safely. Due to dangers present in Black and LGBT+ communities, a space to explore spirituality, belonging, and calm is of utmost importance.
Through the interweaving of Afro-Ancestral spiritual traditions of movement, song and rhythm like Orisha and the art of LGBT+ performance in the Ballroom Scene, otherwise known as “Voguing”, Kiire Wellness creates spaces for Black LGBT+ communities that explore what it means to be liberated, to be empowered, and to have access to Black, African, spiritual expression.
The Free Black Women's Library
The Free Black Women's Library, Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee, at 462 Halsey Community Garden.
The Free Black Women's Library is a social art project, interactive installation, and collection of over 4,000 books that celebrates the brilliance, diversity, and imagination of Black women and Black non-binary authors. The Library also engages in multiple partnerships and collaborations with artists, writers, cultural workers, art institutions, and organizations from across the country. The Library offers a wide array of workshops, film screenings, readings, performances, and radical conversations that provide and inspire counter narratives around race, gender, and culture.
The mission and purpose of the Library is to center and celebrate the creative and intellectual labor of Black women writers from all over the world. The library is grounded in Black Feminist Praxis, radical imagination, collective care, and community building. It aims to provide a space that both liberating and nurturing to the community.
Mafor Mambo Tse | Nelson Mandela High school
Led by BAC Teaching Artist Mafor Mambo Tse, students at Nelson Mandela High School for Social Justice engage in “Lunchtime Community Conversations.”
As a form of outreach with Nelson Mandela High School for Social Justice, BAC Teaching Artist Mafor Mambo Tse has been hosting a series of “Lunchtime Community Conversations.” The series was put together by teachers and students of Nelson Mandela School for Social Justice. The series looks at dance through a social justice lens and covers topics such as police brutality, systemic racism, Black resistance, and mask dance as a form of resistance.
Mambo Tse studied Theory of Communications at Marymount Manhattan College & Corporate Communication at Mercy College in New-York City. She is known as a choreographer, artistic director and performance artist. Over the past seventeen years, she has conducted many community engagement workshops on African dances, histories, music, and cultures globally.
avani patel | P.S. 288 The Shirley Tanyhill
P.S. 288 student creates work inspired by Romare Bearden during a lesson with BAC Teaching Artist Avani Patel.
Avani Patel is a BAC Teaching Artist at P.S. 288 The Shirley Tanyhill. For Black History Month, Patel engaged students in a lesson about African American artist Romare Bearden. Students created mixed media projects inspired by Bearden.
Patel is a painter and visual artist whose work interprets music and expresses it visuall. In her own words: “My paintings invite the viewer to wander through a universe of color and pattern in motion - a world of energy in music manifested in visual form. In the small universe I altered and accepted life of being, from everyday appreciation that gets created on canvas or in my drawings. The idea is to interpret the content of the music and express it via visual images; to create an environment of joy and passion conveying a feeling of dance and festivity while using the psyche’s imagination.”
Cover Image: Persephone DaCosta with Batingua Arts performers at BAC’s 2022 Grantee Celebration. Batingua Arts is a Brooklyn Arts Fund grantee. Photo by Will O’Hare.