The renowned concert venue Carnegie Hall has announced the full schedule of events and performances that will take place in February and March 2022. Afrofuturism will not only take center stage at Carnegie Hall, but will also be presented as a citywide festival celebrating the Black experimental genre that spans across art, literature and music.
“Across New York City, leading cultural organizations present multidisciplinary programming that touches African and African diasporic philosophies, speculative fiction, mythology, comics, quantum physics, cosmology, technology, and more. A diverse range of online offerings also includes film screenings, exhibitions, and talks with some of the leading thinkers and creatives in this multitiered experience,” says the official Carnegie Hall website.
Musical performances include the internationally acclaimed, Grammy-award winning producer, rapper, composer and filmmaker, Flying Lotus, who will be making his Carnegie Hall debut on Feb. 12 at 8 p.m.; music from the Sun Ra Arkestra featuring Kelsey Lu and Moor Mother on Feb. 17 at 9 p.m.; artist Nicole Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble who perform Xenogenesis Suite, inspired by renowned Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler; the powerful afro-experimental jazz artist Angel Bat Dawid on Feb. 24 at 7 p.m., and much more.
In addition, Carnegie Hall will present an exhibition entitled The Black Angel of History: Myth-Science, Metamodernism, and the Metaverse in the Zankel Hall Gallery beginning Feb. 3. The exhibition was curated by Afrofuturism Curatorial Council member Reynaldo Anderson and the Black Speculative Arts Movement. “The Black Angel of History has returned in our hour of decision,” said Anderson. “Black speculative artists from near, abroad and across the sea, inspired by its message, have plumbed the souls of Black folk to share the vision.”
“In developing this festival over the past several years, it’s been exciting to see how Afrofuturism embraces such a diverse array of art forms and the intrinsic role it plays in pop culture,” said Clive Gillinson, Carnegie Hall’s executive and artistic director. “With the incredibly valuable guidance of our Afrofuturism Curatorial Council and in collaboration with our festival partners, we look forward to taking audiences on a vivid journey into this forward-looking theme. It offers the opportunity to experience different genres of music and to expand upon the Hall’s explorations of Black culture undertaken in a number of our previous festivals which have paid tribute to the African American cultural legacy, including programming that examined music and art created in the time of slavery and the Great Migration and during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. With
Afrofuturism, we invite people to join us on a journey of discovery, to be inspired, and to imagine new and empowering visions of the future.”
Other events include Black Feminist Futures at the Schomburg Center as a part of the 10th annual Black Comic Book Festival, Apollo Live Wire: Black Notes / Femme Futures at the Apollo Theater.
To learn more about this month-long series of events, visit https://www.carnegiehall.org.