Black Historical past Month celebrates its 100-year-old anniversary this month and cultural establishments nationwide are recognizing the significance of the century mark with a showcase of performances and occasions. Brooklyn Youngsters’s Museum (BCM) is not any totally different.
Harvard-educated Black historian Carter G. Woodson turned the month of February into Black Historical past Month in 1926. In its earliest years, Black Historical past Month enshrined the contributions of Black folks in American historical past.
For BCM, this isn’t only a time for trying again at historical past, but additionally the right time to look ahead and have interaction youngsters by means of its annual Black Future Pageant.
“As Black Historical past Month turns 100, we’re asking, ‘Who decides what the following 100 years appear to be?’ BCM’s Black Future Pageant provides youngsters the reply: They need to and can,” mentioned BCM President and CEO Atiba Edwards.
This 12 months, the one-week pageant, which usually runs throughout college students’ mid-winter recess, is full of hands-on workshops equivalent to rag doll-making and sculpting, explorations in dancing and music, and an interactive efficiency of “Silver Linings: Triumph of Loss” by Kendra J. Ross, who additionally occurs to be main the inventive course of this 12 months’s Black Future Pageant.
Since 2024, Ross has leveraged her connections with dancers, musicians, and artists to curate the Black Future Pageant.
“We noticed this as a possibility for us to proceed to make use of a few of our wonderful artists who current throughout our annual summer time pageant, which is our flagship program. We have been simply pulling on the community of those that we have already got,” mentioned Ross.
Ross is director and founding father of STooPs, a Mattress-Stuy-based nonprofit based in 2013 that brings the magic and group of block events to varied neighborhoods. Block events are appropriately tied to Black Historical past as a result of they turned fashionable methods of gathering, organizing, and celebrating for city Black and Brown communities. They have been particularly fashionable in the course of the civil rights period.
Whereas many Black Historical past Month shows will concentrate on the civil rights period, Ross hopes to broaden the canon of Black historical past past that point by together with practices from the Black Diaspora and Afrofuturism.
These components present up in quite a lot of methods, equivalent to dance periods, music and instrument-making workshops, sculpture and portrait-making lessons, mini moon-rover constructing workshops, and wearable-jewelry–making lessons, all led by native artists, educators, and instructors of pan-African arts equivalent to PitsiRa Ragophala, Monifa Edwards, Pia Monique Murray, and extra.
BCM will not be a street-level social gathering, nevertheless. Ross mentioned their collaborators have to seek out methods of partaking a youthful and closely family-oriented viewers.
“That is one other alternative for them to shine in a barely totally different means as a result of it’s not as presentational by way of the workshops — it’s extra like educating artist work,” mentioned Ross.
In the identical vein, Ross is a dancer and choreographer first. In her performances, she consists of participatory components to usher in the viewers, like educating stomp and clapping rhythms, and refrain traces when she performs “Silver Linings: Triumph of Loss,” to contain the kids extra.
Created in 2017, her multi-disciplinary work explores profound private and societal loss, and the hope and knowledge that exists after. She mentioned that in this time, she was making an attempt to course of the grief of dropping family members and a person, but additionally what it means to lose the lives of peculiar Black folks whom she didn’t know, like Michael Brown and George Floyd, who turned early martyrs and figures in the course of the Black Lives Matter motion.
“I simply noticed so many examples, each personally and societally, of those ways in which folks had misplaced one thing, however one thing so lovely had really come from that loss. That’s why I initially created this piece,” she mentioned. “It’s not a brand new piece, however I really feel prefer it’s a chunk that feels actually resonant for now.”
The dance feels particularly poignant now as cultural establishments are actively shrinking and erasing the Black expertise in American tradition. Whereas Ross defined that erasure will not be new, it’s being felt on a stage that impacts everybody, particularly Black and Brown youngsters. Nevertheless, the pageant and its classes wanted to resonate with as many individuals as doable.
“We needed to ensure that we cowl that expansiveness [of Black culture] so people can see themselves — and never simply Black people. There are issues that everyone can be taught from the resilience, from the motion, from the resistance, from the intentionality inside Black tradition that we are able to all use,” Ross mentioned. “One of many the explanation why Black Historical past Month exists is as a result of there was and continues to be erasure of the contributions of Black people — particularly in American historical past, but additionally the historical past of the world — so we have now to proceed to push and contextualize Black Historical past Month. As a result of in actuality, Black Historical past is American — interval. Finish of story.”
Black futures are extra necessary than ever, and BCM hopes that it may possibly present the area and programming to jumpstart that future.
“The Black Future Pageant provides younger folks and households the instruments, the imaginative and prescient, and the assist to think about daring futures formed by Black creativity and innovation. We’re proud that BCM is the place the place this work occurs,” mentioned the BCM’s Edwards.
“I needed to ensure that we carry it into the now,” Ross mentioned. “There are issues which have occurred not too long ago, even throughout the lifetime of some younger people. They’re those who’re gonna be the members shaping Black tradition and shaping actions. They will be making some necessary shifts and modifications in the way in which our world exists, similar to within the Civil Rights Motion.”
There may be nonetheless time to expertise the Black Future Pageant — it runs by means of Saturday, Feb. 21. Go to Brooklynkids.org for a full schedule and admission data.
