Black History Month celebrates its 100-year-old anniversary this month and cultural institutions nationwide are recognizing the importance of the century mark with a showcase of performances and events. Brooklyn Children’s Museum (BCM) is no different.
Harvard-educated Black historian Carter G. Woodson turned the month of February into Black History Month in 1926. In its earliest years, Black History Month enshrined the contributions of Black people in American history.
For BCM, this is not just a time for looking back at history, but also the perfect time to look forward and engage children through its annual Black Future Festival.
“As Black History Month turns 100, we’re asking, ‘Who decides what the next 100 years look like?’ BCM’s Black Future Festival gives kids the answer: They should and will,” said BCM President and CEO Atiba Edwards.
This year, the one-week festival, which typically runs during students’ mid-winter recess, is packed with hands-on workshops such as rag doll-making and sculpting, explorations in dancing and music, and an interactive performance of “Silver Linings: Triumph of Loss” by Kendra J. Ross, who also happens to be leading the creative direction of this year’s Black Future Festival.
Since 2024, Ross has leveraged her connections with dancers, musicians, and artists to curate the Black Future Festival.
“We saw this as an opportunity for us to continue to employ some of our amazing artists who present during our annual summer festival, which is our flagship program. We were just pulling on the network of people that we already have,” said Ross.
Ross is director and founder of STooPs, a Bed-Stuy-based nonprofit founded in 2013 that brings the magic and community of block parties to various neighborhoods. Block parties are appropriately tied to Black History because they became popular ways of gathering, organizing, and celebrating for urban Black and Brown communities. They were especially popular during the civil rights era.
While many Black History Month displays will focus on the civil rights era, Ross hopes to expand the canon of Black history beyond that time by including practices from the Black Diaspora and Afrofuturism.
These elements show up in a variety of ways, such as dance sessions, music and instrument-making workshops, sculpture and portrait-making classes, mini moon-rover building workshops, and wearable-jewelry–making classes, all led by local artists, educators, and instructors of pan-African arts such as PitsiRa Ragophala, Monifa Edwards, Pia Monique Murray, and more.
BCM is not a street-level party, however. Ross said their collaborators have to find ways of engaging a younger and heavily family-oriented audience.
“This is another opportunity for them to shine in a slightly different way because it’s not as presentational in terms of the workshops — it’s more like teaching artist work,” said Ross.
In the same vein, Ross is a dancer and choreographer first. In her performances, she includes participatory elements to bring in the audience, like teaching stomp and clapping rhythms, and chorus lines when she performs “Silver Linings: Triumph of Loss,” to involve the children more.
Created in 2017, her multi-disciplinary work explores profound personal and societal loss, and the hope and wisdom that exists after. She said that during this time, she was trying to process the grief of losing loved ones and an individual, but also what it means to lose the lives of ordinary Black people whom she didn’t know, like Michael Brown and George Floyd, who became early martyrs and figures during the Black Lives Matter movement.
“I just saw so many examples, both personally and societally, of these ways that people had lost something, but something so beautiful had actually come from that loss. That’s why I originally created this piece,” she said. “It’s not a new piece, but I feel like it’s a piece that feels really resonant for now.”
The dance feels especially poignant now as cultural institutions are actively shrinking and erasing the Black experience in American culture. While Ross explained that erasure is not new, it’s being felt on a level that affects everyone, in particular Black and Brown children. However, the festival and its lessons needed to resonate with as many people as possible.
“We wanted to make sure that we cover that expansiveness [of Black culture] so folks can see themselves — and not just Black folks. There are things that everybody can learn from the resilience, from the movement, from the resistance, from the intentionality inside Black culture that we can all use,” Ross said. “One of the reasons why Black History Month exists is because there has been and continues to be erasure of the contributions of Black folks — specifically in American history, but also the history of the world — so we have to continue to push and contextualize Black History Month. Because in reality, Black History is American — period. End of story.”
Black futures are more important than ever, and BCM hopes that it can provide the space and programming to jumpstart that future.
“The Black Future Festival gives young people and families the tools, the vision, and the support to imagine bold futures shaped by Black creativity and innovation. We’re proud that BCM is the place where this work happens,” said the BCM’s Edwards.
“I wanted to make sure that we bring it into the now,” Ross said. “There are things that have happened recently, even within the lifetime of some young folks. They are the ones who are gonna be the participants shaping Black culture and shaping movements. They are going to be making some important shifts and changes in the way our world exists, just like in the Civil Rights Movement.”
There is still time to experience the Black Future Festival — it runs through Saturday, Feb. 21. Visit Brooklynkids.org for a full schedule and admission information.