Innovative. Vanguard. Experimental.
Current Exhibitions
Osisi Obodo – Community Shade Tree
Weeksville Heritage Center is proud to announce that we are partnering with Creative Urban Alchemy and the Beam Center to build a new shade structure! This modular onsite pavilion will provide shade, seating, and gathering space for programs and visitors, coming summer 2026.
Weeksville’s new shade structure responds directly to the growing need for refuge and cover during the extreme heat of the summer months. While climate change ushers in heatwaves that grow in frequency and intensity each year, the need to adapt to ensure the safety of our community is ongoing across our city. This need is even greater in neighborhoods such as ours, Northern Crown Heights, where factors such as a lack of tree coverage, fewer green spaces, and urban density contribute to environmental racism, creating pockets that are significantly hotter and more dangerous than other areas.
This project expands on our work as an official New York City cooling site during periods of extreme heat and affirms our commitment to creating a safe space for our community to enjoy all year round. It also creates an exciting new space on site for more art, learning, joy, and connection as a place to sit and enjoy the grounds, rest during outdoor events, and cool down during tours of the Historic Hunterfly Road Houses.
Past Exhibitions
Peace in Destruction: Art from Rikers Island
Homework: Architectures of Belonging
Black Visionaries: Weeksville Then and Now
Torture Island: Past, Present, Future
Forward Ever—Celebrating Where We At Black Women Artists (1971-Now)
Cash Rules Everything Around Me: So let’s start a got damn revolution
Upcoming Exhibitions
Peace in Destruction: Art from Rikers Island
Presented by Groundswell, Peace in Destruction: Art from Rikers Island invites audiences to reflect on incarceration, youth justice, and the enduring power of art to make unseen histories visible.
Past Exhibitions
Through street photographer Martha Cooper’s photography, collaborative murals, film, and sound, Peace in Destruction presented by Groundswell, invited audiences to reflect on incarceration, youth justice, and the enduring power of art to make unseen histories visible.
Fanal – Fè Limyè
Fanal – Fè Limyè, created by artist Fitgi Saint-Louis,is inspired by the Haitian tradition of creating small paper lanterns called Fanal by families and artisans during the winter holiday seasons.
Composed of wood, acrylic, and paint, this sculpture connects tied traditions from Southern American quilting to West African ironwork to embellished Caribbean homes, celebrating a range of local cultures present in New York City. Illuminating each night thanks to a solar panel on its roof, Fanal – Fè Limyè stands as a reminder of the enduring light we each hold and can build upon with our kaleidoscope of collective action.
Homework: Architectures of Belonging
The founding of the original Weeksville community teaches us that the intimate act of building a home was connected to the public act of claiming a space in the wider society. Black men owning property valued at $250 or more secured the right to vote. But property alone does not make a home.
Homework borrows its title from the assertions of scholar Sarah Ahmed, who tells us, “we have much to work out from not being at home in a world.” This labor, “work on and in our homes” seeks the transformation Audre Lorde demanded, requiring new tools to overturn the structures sheltering inequality and domination.
Dwelling in the subjectivity that enacts such transformation, the artists exhibited in Homework, inhabit that first native land, the domestic sphere, and the thresholds between inner and outer worlds. Displacement and yearning appear in these works, alongside gestures and structures that lay claim to space, determined to rebuild.
Presenting an international, multigenerational group, Homework is an invitation to the dream houses in which we can reimagine where we live, and how.
Black Visionaries: Weeksville Then and Now
With great pride, we present the visionary work of Nona Hendryx, acclaimed as Weeksville’s 2025 Artist in Residence, and the esteemed Dream Machine Studio team, as they unveil the remarkable mural, “Black Visionaries: Weeksville Then and Now.”
“Black Visionaries: Weeksville Then and Now” stands as a transformative music-infused, mixed-reality masterpiece. It intricately weaves together themes such as Weeksville’s identity as an oasis, a beacon of Black self-determination, a hub of creativity, and a symbol of profound connection to the land.
Iterative Fictions [IF]
Weeksville Heritage Center is pleased to announce Iterative Fictions [IF], an exhibition featuring new sculpture, sound, and mixed-reality artworks by Eto Otitigbe, culminating his tenure as the 2024 Artist-in-Residence at Weeksville Heritage Center. [IF] invites audiences to engage with narratives reshaped through cycles of storytelling, animating objects from Weeksville’s archival collection.
Torture Island: Past, Present, Future
The Rikers Public Memory Project (RPMP) was founded in 2018 to illuminate the lived experiences of individuals most impacted by Rikers Island, mobilize efforts to repair generational harm, and challenge dehumanizing narratives surrounding incarceration.
In partnership with RPMP, Weeksville Heritage Center presents Torture Island: Past, Present, Future, an exhibition showcasing works from its ongoing initiative with Freedom Agenda, Create Forward, and the Humanities Action Lab.
In Pursuit of Freedom
In Pursuit of Freedom, a collaboration with the Brooklyn Historical Society and Irondale Theater, is a thought-provoking multimedia exhibition that explores the origins of one of the first free black communities in the country. This special exhibition encourages visitors to make discoveries and establish their own meaning about the significance of the pursuit of equity and social justice in america.
Forward Ever—Celebrating Where We At Black Women Artists (1971-Now)
Forward Ever—Celebrating Where We At Black Women Artists, (1971-Now), at Weeksville Heritage Center presents works from members Claudia Aziza Gibson-Hunter, Sadikisha Collier, Jerrolyn Crooks deGracia, Charlotte Ka, Dindga McCannon, Ann Tanksley, Joyce Wellman, and Viola Burley Leak, reflecting on the broader narrative of Black women in art. This exhibition invites us to question how we can sustain spaces that nurture the artistic pursuits of those at the furthest margins, reject the gatekeeping that stifles creativity, and transcend our silos as we harness the power of the collective to support each other on life’s journey.
Inheritance/SHACK
Inheritance/SHACK is a socially engaged collaborative art project inspired by artist Beverly Buchanan’s vernacular shack sculptures – loose interpretations of the cabins that punctuate the Southern landscape. We gathered a group of thirteen community residents from Brooklyn to learn carpentry to design, build, and install shack-like sculptures (birdhouses). Community members engaged deeply with notions presented in Buchanan’s work surrounding domestic architecture as a cultural, economic, and environmental metaphor. Inheritance/SHACK is a space of inquiry for enacting rituals of collective learning, dialogue and speculative imagining about the meaning of inheritance, the cultural necessity of holding African American space and the cultural, symbolic significance of Weeksville.
Imagining Our Future
Imagining Our Future brings together eleven artists from Brooklyn and beyond. From healing societal wounds, strengthening bonds between each other, and becoming better stewards of our natural world, these artists speak to the collective nurturing of our immediate environments as we prepare to birth new worlds together. This exhibition is on view from May 9 to May 31, 2024 at the Weeksville Heritage Center.
40 ACRES: Weeksville
40 ACRES: Weeksville is a photo and video installation by Sandy Williams IV, an artist and educator, who’s work pays homage to the memory of Freedmen communities and acknowledges histories and social oppressions that are often unseen and paved over. 40 Acres is a multilayered public performance using the sky above Crown Heights, Brooklyn, as its stage. The exhibition was on view from February 10th – April 6th, 2024 at Weeksville Heritage Center.
Resurrect / Resistance
“What do Black communities across the diaspora need to resurrect to liberate and heal ourselves?”
“Resurrect / Resistance,” on view at Weeksville Heritage Center November 2 – 25, 2023, explored this inquiry with works by visual artists Deenps “Granbwa” Bazile, Marco Rios, and Josué Guarionex. Curated by Manuela Arciniegas and Erica Harper, the exhibition explored themes of ancestral and spiritual resurrection, along with self and community healing.
Home is Where the Hip-Hop Is
The “Home is Where the Hip-Hop Is” Exhibition showed at weeksville from November – January of 2023.
We explored the power of hip-hop through a collection of images from Ralph McDaniels, Ernie Paniccioli, Delphine Fawundu and Jamel Shabazz—photographers who have captured the spirit of NYC’s urban culture for over 30 years.
Black Exhale NEST
Beginning on June 1, 2022 a human-sized nest was constructed out of natural materials at Weeksville by a gathering community and young creatives from Recess Art’s Assembly program to build sanctuary space for those entering the Black Exhale “NEST”. The exhibition was on view through June 29.
Cash Rules Everything Around Me: So let’s start a got damn revolution
Brooklyn-based performance artist Ayana Evans presents a site-specific, public art project on Weeksville Heritage Center’s exterior windows from April 9–May 15, 2022. The installation featured a series of videos with images from Ayana’s performance archive combined with text highlighting statistics on mass incarceration and economic inequality in New York City.