Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), is a museum of contemporary art located at 80 Hanson Place in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City. It is the first museum of its kind to be opened in New York.
Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), is a museum of contemporary art located at 80 Hanson Place in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York City. It is the first museum of its kind to be opened in New York.
MoCADA was founded in 1999 by Laurie Cumbo in a building owned by the historical Bridge Street AWME Church in the heart of Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
In 2006, MoCADA moved to its current home, an expanded space at 80 Hanson Place, at South Portland Avenue, in Fort Greene, a historically black middle-class neighborhood in Brooklyn which is home to the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) arts district. MoCADA has grown to accommodating many exhibitions throughout the year that highlight various identities of the African Diaspora.
Saying No: Reconciling Spirituality and Resistance in Indigenous Australian Art is an exhibition curated by Australian artist Bindi Cole. Based on Cole's previous exhibition in Australia, Saying No combines the religious ceremonial practices highlighted by Indigenous artist with the protest for Indigenous rights and visibility in the public imagaination. The curatorial statement is as follows: "The word 'no' does not exist in the Australian Aboriginal languages. Where it does exist, this powerful word is reserved for the elders and is used with great care and ceremony. As these languages reach the brink of extinction, indigenous Australian artists are using contemporary art to assert their identity and culture and say no to racism, land theft and colonialism in an urban world. Saying No features sculpture, installation, painting, photography, video, audio and mixed media works." Some of the exhibiting artists include Tony Albert, Vicki Couzens, Fiona Foley, Daniel Boyd and Maree Clark.
In 2012, the museum landed a $100,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to pay for a two-year program that brought monthly concerts to public spaces in NYCHA Houses like Walt Whitman, Ingersoll, and Farragut in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. The concert series, titled "Public Exchange," attracted talented musicians and drew crowds up to 500 or 600. [1] The following year in 2013, MoCADA launched another art performance series, Soul of Brooklyn, which is "a series of block-party style arts events meant to bring the community together and promote local businesses." [2]
From 2001 to 2011, Cumbo served as a graduate professor in the Arts and Cultural Management program at Pratt Institute's School of Art & Design. [3]
In 2014, now-city councilmember Laurie Cumbo designated $1.4 million, her largest capital budget allocation, to MoCADA, which she founded and directed before winning a position on city council. This was matched by the same amount of money in the city's executive budget for the 2015 fiscal year. While technically not illegal, Capital New York noted, her support for the museum is "notable chiefly for the sizable, seven-figure contribution, and for her personal closeness to the recipient organization." The blog reported that for most city council members, "the allocations reported on their conflict-of-interest forms were a fraction of the one to MoCADA." The executive director of Citizens Union, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, said the action “raises questions about why she alone would fund an organization that she founded....It smacks of showing favoritism, in a way that almost crosses the line." [4] 40°41′7″N73°58′27.5″W / 40.68528°N 73.974306°W
Charlie White is an American artist and academic.
RoseLee Goldberg is an American-based art historian, author, critic and curator of performance art. She is most well known as being the founder and director of Performa, a performance art organisation. She is also currently a Clinical Associate Professor of Arts Administration at New York University.
Idelle Lois Weber was an American artist most closely aligned with the Pop art and Photorealist movements.
Sylvia Plimack Mangold is an American artist, painter, printmaker, and pastelist. She is known for her representational depictions of interiors and landscapes. She is the mother of film director/screenwriter James Mangold and musician Andrew Mangold.
Laurie Simmons is an American artist best known for her photographic and film work. Art historians consider her a key figure of The Pictures Generation and a group of late-1970s women artists that emerged as a counterpoint to the male-dominated and formalist fields of painting and sculpture. The group introduced new approaches to photography, such as staged setups, narrative, and appropriations of pop culture and everyday objects that pushed the medium toward the center of contemporary art. Simmons's elaborately constructed images employ psychologically charged human proxies—dolls, ventriloquist dummies, mannequins, props, miniatures and interiors—and also depict people as dolls. Often noted for its humor and pathos, her art explores boundaries such as between artifice and truth or private and public, while raising questions about the construction of identity, tropes of prosperity, consumerism and domesticity, and practices of self-presentation and image-making. In a review of Simmons's 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, critic Steve Johnson wrote, "Collectively—and with a sly but barbed sense of humor—[her works] challenge you to think about what, if anything, is real: in our gender roles, and our cultural assumptions, and our perceptions of others."
Alanna Heiss is the Founder and Director of Clocktower Productions, a non profit arts organization, online radio station, and program partnership with six cultural institutions in three boroughs in New York. She founded The Institute for Art and Urban Resources, Inc. in 1971, an organization focused on using abandoned and underutilized New York City buildings for art exhibitions and artists' studios, of which P.S.1 was a part. She served as the director of P.S.1 and its later incarnation, the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center from its founding in 1976 until her retirement in 2008. She is recognized as one of the originators of the alternative space movement.
The Kidflix Film Fest of Bed-Stuy is a free annual film festival for children and their families presented by the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). With the exception of the 2020 season, it has been held every Friday night in August since 2000.
Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. is an arts organization-in-residence at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Since its inception in 1976, Franklin Furnace has been identifying, presenting, archiving, and making avant-garde art available to the public. Franklin Furnace focuses on time-based art forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, politically unpopular content or their ephemeral or experimental nature. Franklin Furnace is dedicated to serving emerging artists by providing both physical and virtual venues for the presentation of time-based art, including but not limited to artists' books and periodicals, site-specific installations, performance art, and live art on the internet.
Heather T. Hart is an American visual artist who works in a variety of media including interactive and participatory Installation art, drawing, collage, and painting. She is a co-founder of the Black Lunch Table Project, which includes a Wikipedia initiative focused on addressing diversity representation in the arts on Wikipedia.
Laurie A. Cumbo is an American politician and Commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. A Democrat, she served in the New York City Council for the 35th district from 2014 to 2021, which includes the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Fort Greene, Clinton Hill, and Prospect Heights, portions of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Downtown Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Vinegar Hill. She is the founder and first executive director of the Museum of Contemporary African Diaspora Arts.
Mary Miss is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.
Cynthia Marie "Tina" Girouard was an American video and performance artist best known for her work and involvement in the SoHo art scene of the 1960s and early 1970s.
Dianne Smith is an abstract painter, sculptor, and installation artist. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York City's Soho and Chelsea art districts as well as, numerous galleries and institutions throughout the United States, and abroad. She is an arts educator in the field of Aesthetic Education at Lincoln Center Education, which is part of New York City's Lincoln Center For the Performing Arts. Since the invitation to join the Institute almost a decade ago she has taught pre k-12 in public schools throughout the Tri-State area. Her work as an arts educator also extends to undergraduate and graduate courses in various colleges and universities in the New York City area. She has taught at Lehman College, Brooklyn College, Columbia University Teachers College, City College, and St. John's University.
Damali Abrams is a Guyanese-American video-performance artist who lives and works in New York City. She is known for the Self-Help TV, an ongoing video-performance project using her own body to examine issues of self-improvement, race, class and gender.
Steffani Jemison is an American artist, writer, and educator. Her videos and multimedia projects explore the relationship between Black embodiment, sound cultures, and vernacular practices to modernism and conceptual art. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and other U.S. and international venues. She is based in Brooklyn, New York and is represented by Greene Naftali, New York and Annet Gelink, Amsterdam.
Sam Vernon is an installation and performance artist. She works in various media to create her artwork, including sculpture, paintings and photographs. She is interested in "honor[ing] the past while revising historical memory" through works that explore her own personal identity. Several of her art pieces also convey a certain narrative, and this is done through Vernon's various Xerox drawings.
Patrick Dougher is an artist, musician, and art therapist who was born at King's County Hospital and raised in Brooklyn, New York, growing up in the Bushwick neighborhood until the age of 10. He was featured in the Humans of New York series.
Rodeo Caldonia also known as Rodeo Caldonia High Fidelty Performance Theater was a black feminist arts collective based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn during the 1980s. The collective, which operated from about 1985-1988, included nearly 20 African American women who wanted to create feminist work that focused on their identities as Black women. The collective was founded by Lisa Jones and Alva Rogers.
Tanea Richardson is an American artist known for her assemblages and sculptures. Richardson has exhibited her work at the Studio Museum in Harlem, EFA Project Space of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA), in Brooklyn, New York.
Guadalupe Maravilla, formerly known as Irvin Morazan, is a transdisciplinary visual artist, choreographer, and healer. At the age of eight, Maravilla was part of the first wave of unaccompanied, undocumented children to arrive at the United States border in the 1980s as a result of the Salvadoran Civil War. In 2016, Maravilla became a U.S. citizen and adopted the name Guadalupe Maravilla in solidarity with his undocumented father, who uses Maravilla as his last name. As an acknowledgment to his past, Maravilla grounds his practice in the historical and contemporary contexts belonging to undocumented communities and the cancer community. Maravilla's studio is located in Brooklyn, New York.
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