Conversations on Self Determination: Funk and Jazz

Explore music as a soundtrack for social justice. Leading contemporary Brooklyn artists reflect on their art while revisiting the anthems that fortified and consoled the African-American-led struggle for desegregation and equal rights.

Moderator: Una-Kariim A. Cross, artist, writer, and educator

Speakers: Willard Jenkins, jazz writer and radio/TV host; Toshi Reagon, activist, singer, songwriter, and musician working in genres from folk to blues and funk; and Carl Hancock Rux, interdisciplinary performative artist, writer, and playwright.

Performer: Martha Redbone, singer-songwriter and community activist

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center in collaboration with the Schomburg Center presents Conversations on Self Determination, a series to compliment Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn. Curated by Clarisse Rosaz Shariyf and Ladi'Sasha Jones, the trio of Saturday afternoon community discussions will explore themes of music, medicine, and more amongst artists, scholars. and community partners. 

Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn includes a series of diverse, community-based artist commisions, in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Weeksville neighborhoods. The project comprises works by artists Xenobia Bailey, Simone Leigh, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Bradford Young, each of whom is collaborating with a local organization. The commissioned works will build upon the powerful history of Weeksville--founded in 1838 as an independent free Black community and site of self-determination--as well as the larger history of Black radical Brooklyn.