Artist and historian Kamau Ware will lead an off-site walking tour in Lower Manhattan to bring you outside the museum to the streets of New York and make connections with the recognizable and not-so-familiar locations featured in Made in New York City: The Business of Folk Art.
The walk will begin at BGX Studio, 192 Front Street, New York, NY 10038. Please wear comfortable walking shoes.
The rain date for this program is Thursday, June 27 at the same time. Ticket holders will be sent an email Thursday morning confirming that the program is taking place or if it needs to be rescheduled due to weather. Please contact publicprograms@folkartmuseum.org with any questions.
This program is presented by Black Gotham Experience (BGX) in conjunction with its weekly Nerdy Thursdays.
Kamau Ware is a multidimensional creative blending complementary yet disparate disciplines as an artist/historian. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he founded an artist collective called BridgeSpotters, which established him as a pioneer in the early 2000s art scene. In 2006, Ware moved to New York City and activated his photographic and curatorial skills to build a Brooklyn photography studio called Kamau Studios LLC, which employs a visual storytelling approach called “storystyle.”
In 2008, Ware had a life-changing experience when he was working part-time as an educator for the Tenement Museum. After giving a tour of nineteenth-century New York European immigrants, a middle school girl asked him, “Where were the black people?” Compelled by what was a void in the origin story of New York City, Ware developed an artistic historical project called Black Gotham that would make this unknown history an experience. As the Founder & Lead Creative of Black Gotham Experience, Ware has established an expansive public experience that includes interactive walking tours through Manhattan’s Financial District and a developing series of photography-based graphic novels that weave art and history together. The heart of this experience are five stories that revisit Manhattan in 1625, and move forward through three centuries: Other Side of Wall Street, Sarah’s Fire, Caesar’s Rebellion, Citizen Hope, and State of Mirrors.
Ware’s Black Gotham Experience has been featured in the New York Observer, The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Time Out New York. BGX has won awards and grants from Columbia University’s History in Action Project and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has also made appearances on NBC New York, ABC New York, and The Huffington Post to share this unique understanding of the Black Diaspora’s presence in New York City. Recent engagements include a joint presentation by the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Goldman Sachs, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2017); and the inaugural BLERD (Black + Nerd) City Conference (2017); the American Association for State and Local History Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas (2017); Creative Control Fest in Columbus, Ohio (2017); the New Museum IdeasCity in New York (2017); the Annual Max J Bond Jr. Lecture in New York (2017); and SXSWedu & SXSW Interactive in Austin, Texas (2018). This fall 2018, Ware became a visiting professor for the New School, co-teaching a course titled “Blind Spots: A Walk Through New York City’s Black Past.”
Event photos by Matthew Sherman
Image: Photo courtesy of Kamau Ware. Photo by Erika Kapin, 2018.
