Ayo Janeen Jackson made it clear to Leon Pelzer Kirkland that she was the “riffraff handler,” as she put it, at the 50th birthday party for twin friends two years ago.
“‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave,’” she recalled telling Mr. Kirkland after he crashed the party in the backroom at Sisters restaurant in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, on his way home from Fort Greene, where he had been barhopping.
But she quickly added that she was “only kidding” — and after a good laugh at the bar, the two went on to bond over art, and they danced to a D.J. spinning ’90s tunes.
Mr. Kirkland, 48, had been cautious about socializing during Covid since his 12-year-old son from a previous marriage was staying with him every other week.
But June 2023, when he found himself at the birthday party, marked a new era. “This was the first time I was out and about” since the onset of Covid, said Mr. Kirkland, who grew up in Philadelphia and is an associate general counsel at HSBC, a global bank. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish language from Morehouse College and received a law degree from N.Y.U.
That day, he had been preoccupied writing a draft of a lecture for an art-business concept, “Getting PAPER: Art Collecting and Investing Made Accessible.”
Mr. Kirkland first had a snack and drink at the restaurant in the quiet front room, but when he “noticed how lively the back room was,” he described it as a “moth to a flame” situation. Then, coincidentally, “I found myself in a room with people with creative endeavors.”
As Ms. Jackson introduced Mr. Kirkland to a group of friends, many of whom are involved in the arts, she stood behind him, giving them a look to indicate she thought he was cute.
Ms. Jackson, 47, who grew up in Chapel Hill, N.C., is a multidisciplinary artist, focusing on modern dance and visual arts. She has danced with companies including Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in New York City and Ballet Preljocaj in Aix-en-Provence, France. Until June 20, she was an executive assistant at the Joyce Theater in Manhattan, and will begin working as one with a celebrity chef in July.
She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance from University of North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem, and received an M.F.A. in interdisciplinary arts from School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her previous marriage, like Mr. Kirkland’s, ended in divorce.
“‘Well Ms. Jackson,’” Mr. Kirkland said before he left Sisters. “‘I need to get your phone number so I can take you out on a date.’”
Six months earlier, “I stopped doing online dating,” Ms. Jackson said. “I was telling people I want to get married again.” That’s when she met Mr. Kirkland.
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After two weeks of “amazing conversations” by text and phone, Ms. Jackson said, they met at the Print Center New York in Chelsea, where Mr. Kirkland wowed her with a bouquet of herbs from the garden of his brownstone in Bedford-Stuyvesant — sage, rosemary, thyme, lavender and mint — tied with kitchen twine.
They later walked along the High Line, had dinner at Hav & Mar, a seafood restaurant nearby, and enjoyed margaritas at Dos Caminos in the meatpacking district.
A few days later, on Juneteenth, he attended a screening of her film “Tear, Suture, Scab,” about a Black unicorn, an allegory about being Black in America, at Nitehawk Cinema in Prospect Park West.
Later, he helped her pack and then cooked dinner at his place. There, he showed her artwork by Black artists and photos of his maternal grandfather, the Rev. Joseph T. Kirkland, during a 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march in Alabama with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been his grandfather’s classmate at what was then Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pa.
“Let’s make summer plans,” Mr. Kirkland suggested after they visited the Dia Beacon, a museum in Beacon, N.Y., in early July.
“Those four words had me,” she said. “He saw me in his future. It gave me peace of mind.”
In September, when he accompanied her to a wedding in the South of France, they also visited museums in Paris and hashed out a concept for Ms. Jackson’s solo print show at Herron School of Art + Design at Indiana University in June 2024.
In August 2024, she moved in with him on one condition: “I’m not moving in unless we get married,” she said. “Just ask my dad for my hand.”
Mr. Kirkland did exactly that the same month, while her parents were in town, and proposed when they were back, in February, during a fish fry he hosts annually.
On June 14, Cordell W. Thomas II, a close friend of the groom who received a one day officiant license from the State of New York, led an intimate ceremony in the couple’s dining area where they jumped the broom in the African-American tradition. Everyone then enjoyed brunch at the Clement restaurant at the Peninsula hotel in Manhattan. The couple now runs Pelzer Projects, a fine art print publishing company.
A bigger celebration followed that evening in their brownstone, where the Incredible Drunkertons, a music-comedy duo, entertained 75 guests and performed “Endless Love” for the couple’s first dance amid the photos of the groom’s grandfather during the Selma march.
“It’s not about being next to famous people,” Ms. Jackson said. “It’s the hard work his grandfather had done. It comes from a place I know. I come from that, too.”
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