OUR ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO THE BOROUGH OF KINGS
The meaning of freedom
Artists speak directly to Brooklyn in BAM’s ‘Let Freedom Ring’ installation
COURIER LIFE, JANUARY 15-21, 2021 25
BY CRAIG HUBERT
The pandemic has changed things.
Preparing the Brooklyn Academy of
Music’s annual Martin Luther King
Day celebration, which will be held
virtually this year on Jan. 18, the organizers
wondered how to incorporate
an art project into the fabric of an
event that nobody can attend in person.
Usually, a gallery show of some
kind is attached to the historic celebration,
which has been held for 34 years
and attracts large crowds for its talks
and musical performances.
So they came up with a plan. Why
not make use of BAM’s famous sign
that hangs over the corner of Lafayette
Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, a
busy intersection?
“It’s always been this shiny thing
that I’ve wanted to utilize as a platform
for conversations through the
arts,” said Larry Ossei-Mensah, who
curated the project, called “Let Freedom
Ring,” which is on view from Jan.
15 through Jan. 21. “I thought it was an
appropriate platform not only to celebrate
the memory of Dr. King but to invite
artists to refl ect on what the idea
of freedom means.”
Different works addressing the
theme will appear on the screen at different
times. Ossei-Mensah reached
out to a group of artists from Brooklyn
with the idea but left it open for interpretation.
He says the main focus was
to invite artists to have a conversation
with the borough.
That conversation will take many
forms. The Dominican artist Lizania
Cruz, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant,
went back to “A Freedom Budget
for All Americans,” a proposal put together
by Dr. King along with A. Philip
Randolph and Bayard Rustin. “What is
most striking is that a lot of the things
they were asking for are things you
would see today — health care for all,
basic income, education for all, clean
air and clean water,” Cruz said. “I’m
interested in pushing this conversation
further. What could be a freedom
budget for the government?”
For the photojournalist Laylah
Amatullah Barrayn, the idea of freedom
sent her to her archives. “What
came to mind fi rst was identity,” she
said. “Particularly as a woman of African
descent, a southern woman living
in New York, fi rst-generation — my
family has 400 years of rooted foundational
ties to the south. So identity is
very much important to me.”
She selected three photographs that
expanded on the idea, which will be displayed
on the BAM sign. One is a selfportrait,
which she has never publicly
shown due to the majority of her work
being in photojournalism. The second
photo is of a woman at the March on
Washington in August 2020, and the
last photograph is a mother and son engaging
in the Afro-Brazilian martial
art Capoeira, a practice which Amatullah
Barrayn documented for fi ve years.
Other artists participating in the
project include Derrick Adams, Alvin
Armstrong, Kameelah Janan
Rasheed, Hank Willis Thomas and
Jasmine Wahi.
Ultimately, the hope for the project
was to engage a different audience.
“Now they’ll pay more attention when
they are going down Flatbush,” Ossei-
Mensah said. “It’s an invitation to stop
and pause, take it in, assess, refl ect.
Hopefully, it will start a conversation
about what freedom means.”
BIG PICTURE: Artists Laylah Amatullah Barrayn and Lizania Cruz, and curatorLarry Ossei-
Mensah. Photos by Barnabas Crosby, Manolo Salas, and Aarom Ramey