Toya Lillard is not a real estate agent. But she had the practiced patter of one, a few weeks ago, while giving a tour of the new headquarters of 651 Arts, a Brooklyn organization dedicated to African diasporic performance. For an arts administrator, she’s been giving a lot of tours lately.
That’s because Lillard, 651’s executive director, has something to show off. The organization’s bright and shiny new space is across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Mark Morris Dance Center. It takes up the fourth floor of 10 Lafayette — a city-owned arts complex attached to the 45-story tower at 300 Ashland, which houses luxury apartments, a Whole Foods and an Apple Store. The new digs, which include a black box theater and three rehearsal studios, are as fancy as the neighbors.
More significant than the grandeur, though, is that for the first time in its 37-year history, 651 has a home of its own. “The space allows 651 Arts the opportunity to control their own destiny,” said Mikki Shepard, one of its founders.
Instead of always having to find places for its artists to rehearse and perform, 651 is now “at the helm,” Lillard said. “We can determine how best to use the space and how best to serve our community.”
One of the first uses comes on Jan. 16, with the premiere of “Against Gravity: Flying Afrikans + Other Legends,” a multimedia solo performance by the Brooklyn choreographer André Zachery. Another is a program offering artists subsidized space rental, perennially scarce in a real-estate market as expensive as New York’s. “When you think about artists in Brooklyn, particularly Black artists, there’s a dearth of affordable space for them to make work,” Lillard said. “We’re trying to answer that need.”
The search for a home has been a long one, especially for an organization that has an address in its name. 651 began as an outgrowth of the Brooklyn Academy, and until 2014 it was given office space at 651 Fulton Street, on the site of the Majestic Theater that the Brooklyn Academy renovated in 1987 (and that is now called BAM Harvey).
The idea for 651 came “out of a call from the Black community right here in Fort Greene,” Lillard said. “They were saying, ‘Why is BAM busing in audiences from the Upper West Side to hear German opera? We’re here. We’ve been here.’”
Shepard and Leonard Goines, both of whom had produced Black dance and music events at the Brooklyn Academy, were tasked with responding to that call. Soon, 651 was backing music and theater works by artists including Anna Deavere Smith, Sekou Sundiata and Carl Hancock Rux, and boosting the careers of choreographers like Ronald K. Brown, Bebe Miller, Donald Byrd and Ralph Lemon.
Creating a network with other local arts groups, 651 sent artists into Brooklyn to teach. Its programs Africa Exchange and Black Dance: Tradition and Transformation brought to New York contemporary choreographers and musicians from across the United States and Africa to perform and give workshops — recruiting artists that almost no one else in New York was championing. In recent years, its Juneteenth celebrations have become some of the liveliest in the city.
But all of these events took place in some other institution’s theater or studio, squeezed onto some other institution’s calendar. When 651’s 25-year lease at 651 Fulton ended in 2013, it had already been chosen as an occupant of the new arts complex — which also includes space for the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library and three movie theaters in an extension of BAM Rose Cinemas. Construction delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic were followed by more delays. When Lillard came onboard in 2022, she expected to open the next year.
“My first year was basically a crash course in what it means to be involved in a capital project with the city,” she said. “Opening a building sounded very glamorous, but I got a hard hat and a punch list” — a document enumerating everything that still had to be completed.
Now that it’s done, Lillard has been focusing on what she calls “skin to skin contact,” conducting “friends and family tours” for local artists, arts organizations and Black business owners. Inhabiting a building that could be seen as one of the most conspicuous symbols of gentrification in the area, Lillard has been working to make sure that the community 651 was created to serve feels invited.
“With the aggressive gentrification that’s been happening lately, there’s been a lot of cultural erasure,” she said. “No one is intending to erase, but folks come to this area and are unaware of the cultural ecosystems that existed before them.”
Lillard sees 651 Arts as a counterforce to this pattern. On a recent tour, she was especially excited when showing a room filled with boxes — the not-quite-finished location of the organization’s archives. The photos, programs and recordings in the archives are “receipts,” she said. “They’re the way to say, ‘We’ve been here.’”
“Against Gravity” is a response to a different kind of cultural erasure. Zachery, 42, said that during the racial justice protests of 2020, he was disturbed to hear younger Black people say things like, “This has never happened before.” It seemed to him that what had happened in the 1980s and ’90s, the decades of his own youth in Chicago, was a story that wasn’t being told.
“In the arts, we’re always talking about the ’60s, but the ’80s were really devastating,” he said, mentioning the suffering wrought by crack and AIDS. “And then there was the antidote, the hip-hop and house parties where we Black teenagers came together. Sometimes people think my generation just came out of nowhere, but no.”
“Against Gravity,” which Zachery wrote with the director Ayinde Jean-Baptiste, addresses this history through three representative Chicago figures: Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader who was killed by the police in 1969; Harold Washington, who served as the first Black mayor of the city from 1983 to 1987; and Ben Wilson, a star high-school basketball player who was shot to death in 1984.
“Revolutionary, elected official, athlete — what does my manhood look like if it’s not one of these types?” Zachery asked. “What if being an artist and a nurturer and an organizer of youth is also what being a man is?”
“Against Gravity” draws much of its text from the work of the Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks. “She’s a Black woman who saw the lives of all these men,” Zachery said. “I grew up learning and reciting her poems, and she is the thread that binds the work together.”
What about those flying Africans in the title? Zachery and Jean-Baptiste drew on many sources: the novel “Salt” by Earl Lovelace, Virginia Hamilton’s folk tale collection “The People Could Fly,” Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” and especially Julie Dash’s film “Daughters of the Dust,” which includes the story of Igbo Landing in Georgia, where enslaved Africans drowned themselves — or, as legend has it, flew back home across the water.
“Across our diaspora, the necessity of flight has been part of our survival mechanism,” Zachery said. “Sometimes if gravity says it’s going be a certain way, you say, ‘Nope.’ And you supplant it in a way that has gravity saying, ‘How the hell did you do that?’”
For Zachery, 651 Arts is an obvious source of help to get this story told. He recalled the many 651-supported artists who inspired him when he was starting out in Brooklyn 20 years ago. “651 was a sign of quality, of where I could go to be informed,” he said. “I’m working hard to do that justice.”
Following its practice of introducing artists and their work before a performance, 651 has presented a series of community engagement workshops related to “Against Gravity.” One was a poetry workshop based on Brooks’s poems; another was a screening (and a discussion) of “Benji,” a sports documentary about Wilson.
During “Black Revival: A Healing Movement Ritual for Men,” Zachery led participants through movement exercises, some focused on the sensation of being held. “That’s a sensation we men often lose,” he said. “But you can remember through your body what it means to be supported.”
Lillard said that the ideas of “Against Gravity” resonate with the history of 651 Arts and its present expansion. “This is a risk we’re taking,” she said. “We’re not BAM. We don’t have huge reserves. But it’s a risk we hope will pay off.”
Referring to that risk and also to uncertainty about the coming presidential administration, she added: “Andre’s piece is so timely because we are all going to have to defy gravity. We’re going to have to figure out another way to fly.”
When preparing for that kind of flight, it helps to have a home.
The post A Brooklyn Arts Group Gets Its Own Home, a Place to Defy Gravity appeared first on New York Times.
