On Saturday, July 25, Greg Tate, the late, great journalist and musician, will be the subject of “New Eyes on Greg Tate: Flyboy in the Buttermilk Revisited,” a celebration from New Eyes Collective. The program will take place at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Downtown Brooklyn (10 Lafayette Avenue) from 1–5 p.m.
The centerpiece of “New Eyes on Greg Tate” is an interactive series of discussions dedicated to Tate’s 1992 acclaimed collection of essays, “Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” The event will feature several contemporary writers, authors, and cultural critics, including Clover Hope, Lawrence Burney, Timmhotep Aku, Shamira Ibrahim, Andre Dee, and more.
“Flyboy in the Buttermilk” recently received a special re-release via Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s publishing imprint, AUWA Books. The book is an anthology of Tate’s essays from various publications, commenting on Blackness at the root of sexuality, pop culture, and politics. New Eyes Collective and MoCADA will give away a limited number of free copies of the re-released book to attendees on a first-come/first-served basis. For those not lucky enough to get a free copy, the book will be available for purchase on MoCADA’s website (mocada.org).
Tate was a highly respected and influential creative force. He wrote eloquently and provocatively about Black art, music, and culture for publications like The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, DownBeat, and Vibe. He was also a talented musician and poet, and one of the co-founders of the Black Rock Coalition, an initiative that helped Black working musicians with finding performance venues and getting proper compensation, particularly in his native New York City.
Tate died on December 8, 2021, due to cardiac arrest. He was 64 years old. In recognition of his stellar work on Black culture and being among the first journalists to chronicle hip-hop, Tate received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2024.
Many of the speakers set to be on the panel have written about how much Tate inspired them and the culture at large. “Tate reminded us that loving something means not only appreciating it but holding it to account too,” Aku wrote in his piece, “Greg Tate Spoke Inconvenient Truths.” In his essay, “Greg Tate’s Writing Felt Like Time Travel,” Burney wrote, “Tate’s superpower was his ability to record his observations in a sharp conversational tone that entertained as much as it sought to educate.”
New Eyes describes itself as a “Black cultural workers continuing the Black radical tradition of criticism, journalism, archiving, and collective resource-sharing.” The collection of Black journalists served as writers, editors, and contributors to publications like the New York Times, FADER, Pitchfork, and more. Their goal is to provide mutual aid, public programming, and archival preservation for fellow Black journalists.
Tickets to “New Eyes on Greg Tate: Flyboy in the Buttermilk Revisited” are free, and RSVPs can be obtained at posh.vip. Due to limited space, RSVPs do not guarantee entry, so it is advised to come early for first-come/first-served attendance.
