CREATIVE TIME

Xenobia Bailey participating in Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn. [image description: the artist sits in a room decorated with coupon pages from newspapers, she is folding more newspaper and smiling off camera, she wears an orange crochet hat and glasses]

The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation supported The 2013 Creative Time Summit: Art, Place & Dislocation in the 21st Century City. The conference on arts and social justice, Creative Time's fifth annual, explored the diverse set of practices, campaigns, theories, and practicalities that accompany contemporary urban phenomena variously described as creative economies, gentrification, and place-making. The support of the Rubin Foundation helped to bring artists and presenters from all over the globe to the Skirball Center at NYU to share big ideas, big projects, hopes, and dreams.

In 2014 The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation supported Creative Time's exhibition Funk, God, Jazz, and Medicine: Black Radical Brooklyn, a series of diverse, community-based artist commissions by socially-engaged artists Xenobia Bailey, Simone Leigh, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and Bradford Young.

Each of the artists collaborated with a beloved local organization to honor their historic contributions to the neighborhood of Weeksville, which encompasses parts of Crown Heights and Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each commission built upon the powerful history of Weeksville - founded in 1838 as an independent free black community and site of self-determination - as well as the larger context of Black radicalism in Brooklyn.

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