Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center present "Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn" (9/20)

Creative Time and Weeksville Heritage Center present 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 launches 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 draws 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.

Installations include artist Xenobia Bailey remaking the world as "funkified" in collaboration with Boys & Girls High School; filmmaker Bradford Young presenting a film on refuge and the African-American diaspora inside the historic sanctuary of Bethel Tabernacle AME Church; collective Otabenga Jones & Associates broadcasting music and radical histories from a pink 1959 Cadillac, in collaboration with Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium; and Simone Leigh presenting a costumed, performative space for dignified healthcare inside Stuyvesant Mansion in tribute to forgotten Black medical pioneers.