Weeksville Heritage Center to Partner With Creative Capital Award Recipient

BROOKLYN, N.Y., Oct. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Weeksville Heritage Center launches its 2020 Artist-In-Residency with performance artist, culture strategist, and 2020 Creative Capital grant recipient, Ebony Noelle Golden. Through this residency, which culminates June 2022, she will develop Jubilee 11213, a multi-generational and multi-year program that includes the exploration of Weeksville's archives and historic themes. Golden is the first artist to explore Weeksville's archives as the subject of a performance and community organizing project. Her work employs site-specific performance rituals and live art installations that explore the relationships between creativity and liberation. This collaboration is the result of a performance at Weeksville Heritage Center by Golden's company, Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative (BDAC), in the summer of 2018.

The Weeksville Artist in Residence (Weeksville AIR) program provides an opportunity for visual and performance artists of the African diaspora to explore connections between historic and contemporary communities while supporting artistic process and community engagement.  Jubilee 112213 is a community-powered processional performance ritual that activates Weeksville Heritage Center's archives and re-mixes the center's current walking tour into a re-imagined protest-parade and public display of collective emancipation. By activating the legacy of creative emancipation and collective imagining practiced at Weeksville's founding, Jubilee 11213 advances sustainable practices of civic engagement and creativity that support self-determination, social good, and community power now and into the future.

"My creative work is finding its visionary wings at Weeksville. I found myself pondering if they could find ways to access freedom, so can I and so can we," said Ebony Noelle Golden of the collaboration. "I am grateful to be on this freedom journey with Weeksville Heritage Center and the fierce community that finds its radical home in this sacred community."

"This collaboration is another example of the innovative ways that Weeksville seeks to engage people in Black history, both to use examples from the past as strong foundations and to inspire ways to imagine and create better futures," said Rob Fields, Weeksville's president and executive director.

"Weeksville's artist residency builds on our ongoing research work by providing a sanctuary for Black artists to experiment, create, and add to Weeksville's documentation process by producing new materials that are archived as part of our collection," noted Weeksville program manager Zenzele Cooper. "I can't think of a more fitting artist-in residence at this moment than Ebony Noelle Golden because her work aligns with Weeksville's legacy of self-determination, liberation, and community building."

Weeksville Heritage Center
Weeksville Heritage Center is a historic site and cultural center in Central Brooklyn that uses education, arts and a social justice lens to preserve, document, and inspire engagement with the history of Weeksville, one of the largest free Black communities in pre-Civil War America, and the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses.

https://www.weeksvillesociety.org/ 

Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative
Led by artist-scholar-organizer Ebony Noelle Golden, Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative (BDAC) is a cultural consultancy and arts accelerator that powers public performance, systems, strategies, and solutions for and with the arts and culture, social justice, wellness, community development, nonprofit and education ecosystems globally.

https://bettysdaughterarts.com/

Media Contact:
Rob Fields
[email protected] 
718-756-5250

SOURCE Weeksville Heritage Center

Related Links

http://www.weeksvillesociety.org

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