Remy Kouakou Kouame & Joshua Mclean perform during ILHC 2022. Image via ILHC.
During Memorial Day Weekend 2023 (May 25–29), an estimated 1,000 swing dance and jazz music enthusiasts will gather in New York City’s historic Harlem neighborhood to “Celebrate Lindy Hop where it all began!” with the World Finals of the 2023 International Lindy Hop Championships.
With its gleaming shopping centers and refurbished row houses, today’s Harlem bears little resemblance to the neighborhood of the midcentury urban crisis. In The Roots of Urban Renaissance: Gentrification and the Struggle over Harlem, first published in 2017 by Harvard University Press, Brian D. Goldstein traces Harlem’s Second Renaissance to a surprising source: the radical social movements of the 1960s that resisted city officials and fought to give Harlemites control of their own destiny. Inspired by the civil rights movement, young activists envisioned a Harlem built by and for its low-income, predominantly African American population. In the succeeding decades, however, the community-based organizations they founded came to pursue a very different goal: a neighborhood with national retailers and increasingly affluent residents.
Reclining Liberty by artist Zaq Landsberg in Morningside Park, Harlem. Image courtesy Connie Lee, Public Art Initiative, President, Marcus Garvey Park Alliance.
Sculpture artist Zaq Landsberg created and presented the illustrations for this piece during the last administration, prior to COVID-19 and our citywide shutdown. It was inspired by Buddhist imagery, and meant to depict our iconic American landmark, weary, reclining, and asking the question ~ “what stage of America are we in.” COVID-19 closed our city, and Reclining Lady lay waiting, like all of us, for better days.
Harlem Late Night Jazz, Inc. presents St. Nick’s Pub Dedication Jazz Festival with 14 very special one-time performances, jam sessions, singers, tap dancers and more. Join the celebration….
Continuing with The Studio Museum in Harlem ~ outside the walls, inHarlem announced its next two projects in and around the community, in collaboration with Marcus Garvey Park Alliance and The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
“Marching On: The Politics of Performance” by Bryony Roberts, Mabel O. Wilson, and the Marching Cobras of New York. Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2017. Image by Bryony Roberts.
The exhibition, Marching On: The Politics of Performance at Storefront for Art and Architecture explores the legacy of marching and organized forms of performance within the African-American community, as “agents of cultural and political expression, celebrating collective identities and asserting rights to public space and visibility.”
Marching On: The Politics of Performance – Final performance on Saturday, June 9th from 5-6:30pm at Storefront for Art and Architecture, 97 Kenmare Street.
It’s back ~ Spirit of Harlem ~ With a new plaque, dedicating the Mural to the Harlem Community. (and at the same time, we mourn the passing of the artist, Louis Delsarte, on May 2, 2020).
The timeline & adventure of a Community coming together to get this beloved mural back on view is below
New plaque, dedicating the Mural to the Harlem Community