Toya Lillard shouldn’t be an actual property agent. However she had the speaking level practiced a number of weeks in the past whereas giving a tour of the brand new headquarters of 651 Arts, a Brooklyn group devoted to representing the African diaspora. She was an arts administrator making many rounds these days.
That is as a result of Lillard, the 651 govt, has so much to brag about. The group’s shiny and glossy new house is throughout the road from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Mark Morris Dance Middle. It occupies the fourth ground of 10 Lafayette, an city arts advanced connected to the 45-story 300 Ashland tower that homes luxurious residences, a Complete Meals and an Apple Retailer. The brand new digs, which embrace a black field theater and three rehearsal studios, are as stunning as their neighbors.
Extra vital than the grandeur, nonetheless, is that for the primary time in its 37-year historical past, the 651 has its own residence. “The house permits 651 Arts the chance to regulate its personal future,” stated Mickey Shepherd, one in every of its founders.
As an alternative of at all times having to seek out locations for its artists to rehearse and carry out, 651 is now “in cost,” Lillard stated. “We will decide how greatest to make use of the house and the way greatest to serve our group.”
One of many first makes use of comes on January 16, with the premiere of “Against Gravity: Flying Africans + Other Legends,” a multimedia one-man present by the choreographer from Brooklyn Andre Zackery. One other is a program providing sponsored rental house to artists, perennially scarce in an actual property market as costly as New York’s. “When you consider artists in Brooklyn, particularly black artists, there is a dearth of inexpensive house for them to work in,” Lillard stated. “We’re making an attempt to satisfy that want.”
The seek for a house is lengthy, particularly for a corporation that has an deal with in its title. 651 started as an outgrowth of Brooklyn Academy and by 2014. obtained workplace house at 651 Fulton Avenue, on the location of the Majestic Theater, which Brooklyn Academy renovated in 1987. (and which is now referred to as BAM Harvey).
The concept for 651 got here “after an enchantment from the black group proper right here in Fort Greene,” Lillard stated. “They had been saying, ‘Why does BAM draw audiences from the Higher West Aspect to listen to German opera?’ We’re right here. We have been right here.
Sheppard and Leonard Gownes, each producers of black dance and music occasions on the Brooklyn Academy, had been tasked with answering this name. Quickly 651 was supporting musical and theatrical works by artists together with Anna Deaver Smith, Sekou Sundiata, and Carl Hancock Rooks, and fostering the careers of choreographers reminiscent of Ronald Okay. Brown, Bebe Miller, Donald Byrd, and Ralph Lemon.
Networking with different native artwork teams, 651 sends artists to Brooklyn to show. Its Africa Trade packages and Black Dance: Tradition and Transformation delivered to New York up to date choreographers and musicians from the USA and Africa to carry out and provides workshops – recruiting artists that nearly nobody else in New York supported. in recent times the celebration of June 1st have develop into one of many liveliest within the metropolis.
However all these occasions occurred in one other establishment’s theater or studio, squeezed into one other establishment’s calendar. When 651’s 25-year lease at 651 Fulton resulted in 2013, he was already chosen as an occupant of the new art complex — which additionally contains house for the Museum of Up to date African Diaspora Artwork, a department of the Brooklyn Public Library, and three film theaters within the BAM Rose Cinemas growth. Development delays attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic had been adopted by extra delays. When Lillard got here on board in 2022, she anticipated to open the next 12 months.
“My first 12 months was mainly a crash course in what it means to be concerned in a capital undertaking with town,” she stated. “Opening a constructing sounded very glamorous, however I bought a helmet and a punch record” — a doc itemizing every thing that also wanted to be accomplished.
Now that that is executed, Lillard is specializing in what she calls “skin-to-skin contact,” holding “pal and household excursions” for native artists, arts organizations and black enterprise homeowners. Occupying a constructing that may be seen as one of many space’s most seen symbols of gentrification, Lillard works to ensure the group 651 was created to serve feels invited.
“With the aggressive gentrification that is been happening these days, there’s been a number of cultural erasure,” she stated. “Nobody intends to wipe out, however individuals come into this space and they do not know concerning the cultural ecosystems that existed earlier than them.”
Lillard sees 651 arts as a counter to that sample. On a current tour, she was notably excited when she confirmed off a room filled with containers — the unfinished location of the group’s archives. Images, packages and data within the archives are “receipts,” she stated. “They’re your approach of claiming, ‘We have been right here.’
“Towards Gravity” is a response to a distinct form of cultural erasure. Zachery, 42, stated in the course of the 2020 racial justice protests. was disturbed to listen to youthful black individuals say issues like, “This has by no means occurred earlier than.” It appeared to him that what occurred within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties, the a long time of his personal youth in Chicago, was an untold story.
“Within the arts, we at all times discuss concerning the ’60s, however the ’80s had been actually devastating,” he stated, referring to the struggling attributable to crack and AIDS. “After which there was the antidote, hip-hop and the home events the place we black youngsters would get collectively. Generally individuals assume my technology simply got here out of nowhere, however no.”
Towards Gravity, which Zachery wrote with director Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, examines this story by way of three consultant Chicago figures: Fred Hampton, a Black Panther chief who was killed by police in 1969; Harold Washingtonwho served as town’s first black mayor from 1983 to 1987; and Ben Wilson, a star highschool basketball participant who was shot in 1984.
“Revolutionary, elected official, athlete — what does my masculinity appear like if it isn’t a type of varieties?” Zachery requested. “What if being an artist, educator, and organizer of youth can be what being a person is?”
Towards Gravity attracts a lot of its textual content from the work of the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. “She’s a black lady who has seen the lives of all these males,” Zachery stated. “I grew up studying and reciting her poems, and he or she is the thread that ties the work collectively.”
What about these flying Africans within the title? Zackery and Jean-Baptiste draw from many sources: Earl Lovelace’s novel Salt, Virginia Hamilton’s folktale assortment Males Can Fly, Toni Morrison’s Tune of Solomon, and particularly Julie Sprint’s movie “Daughters of the Dust,” which incorporates the story of the Igbo Touchdown in Georgia, the place enslaved Africans drowned—or, as legend has it, flew again dwelling throughout the water.
“In our diaspora, the necessity to escape is a part of our survival mechanism,” Zacheri stated. “Generally if gravity says it’ll be a sure approach, you say ‘No.’ And also you substitute it in a approach that has gravity, saying, “How the hell did you try this?”
For Zachery, 651 Arts is an apparent supply of assist to inform this story. He recalled the numerous artists supported by 651 who impressed him when he was beginning out in Brooklyn 20 years in the past. “The 651 was an indication of high quality, of the place I might go to be told,” he stated. “I am working exhausting to do that justice.”
Following its follow of introducing artists and their work earlier than a efficiency, 651 introduced a sequence of group engagement workshops associated to Towards Gravity. One was a poetry workshop based mostly on Brooks’ poems; one other was a screening (and dialogue) of Benji sports activities documentary about Wilson.
Through the “Black Revival: A Healing Movement Ritual for Men,” Zachery led individuals by way of motion workouts, some centered on the feeling of being held. “It is a feeling that we males typically lose,” he stated. “However you’ll be able to keep in mind by way of your physique what it means to be supported.”
Lillard stated the concepts behind “Towards Gravity” resonate with the historical past of 651 Arts and its present growth. “It is a threat we take,” she stated. “We’re not BAM. We do not have large reserves. However it’s a threat that we hope will repay.”
Citing that threat, in addition to uncertainty concerning the upcoming presidential administration, she added: “Andre’s publish is so well timed as a result of we are going to all must defy gravity. We’ll have to determine one other technique to fly.
When getting ready for this sort of flight, it helps to have a house.
