Creative Time presented Funk, God, Jazz and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn from September 20th to October 14th, 2014 The multi-artist engagement in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights neighborhoods was co-presented with the Weeksville Heritage Center, a partnership that began nearly three years ago. The project unveiled a series of diverse, community-based artist commissions by trailblazing and socially-engaged artists Xenobia Bailey, Simone Leigh, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Bradford Young—each of whom collaborated with a beloved local organization to honor their historic contributions at a time when the neighborhood is quickly transforming. Each commission built 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 context of Black radicalism in Brooklyn. 

In advance of the project’s run, each artist entered into meaningful partnerships with local community organizations. Audience members were then invited to participate and visit the different site-specific installations throughout the run of the show. In the spring of 2014, Xenobia Bailey worked for twenty weeks with the nearby Boys and Girls High School students to produce “funk-tional” handmade furniture from recycled materials, designed in the African-American aesthetic of Funk and installed inside one of Weeksville’s historic Hunterfly Road homes. Bradford Young partnered with Bethel Tabernacle AME Church to create Bynum Cutler, a film on refuge and diaspora that was installed inside the history church sanctuary at P.S. 83 that honors the church’s elders—the “Living Legends”—while revealing tensions between collective forgetting and changing cityscapes. Otabenga Jones & Associates, together with the Central Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, turned the back of a 1959 Cadillac into OJBK-FM, a community radio station that investigates connections between jazz, hip-hop, self-determination, and the history of “the East,” (1969-1985), a legendary Bedford-Stuyvesant educational, political and cultural hub. Simone Leigh brought Brooklyn-based health and wellness practitioners to the historic Stuyvesant Mansion, creating the temporary Free People’s Medical Clinic to explore the beauty, dignity and power of Black nurses and doctors whose work is often hidden from view. Each weekend, free health and wellness services were offered at the clinic ranging from yoga and dance classes, to acupuncture, massages, and HIV testing. Through these projects, Black Radical Brooklyn brought renewed attention to Weeksville and its community.