JUNETEENTH

Schedule of Events

Saturday, June 13

By Niegel Smith • Featuring Talu Green, Ayana Evans, & Asia Stewart

Join an afro-futuristic griot (Niegel Smith) on a Juneteenth walk exploring our city through the lens of black love and queer liberation. Co-led by Talu Green with his commanding Djembe drumming, The Worthy is a performance that will take you through the African Burial Ground National Monument, past civic buildings, and through the streets of lower Manhattan as we celebrate the intrinsic worth of Queer Black folks. Featuring spotlight performances from Ayana Evans and Asia Stewart, the walk will conclude at The Flea, and then invites you to celebrate and reflect over liberation libations on a private patio. There you will meet the artists, learn more about the work, and commune with your fellow travelers.

Julian Rozzell makes art to escape from cynicism. His work channels memory, nostalgia, surrealism, and possibility through a distinctly Black lens, using abstraction to carry what words cannot. Colorful, figurative, and fragmented, his paintings have a particular pull toward social justice movements of his early childhood, and the edges of Black punk and alternative culture.

Prints and originals of Julian's work will be available to view and collect. Please visit https://www.julianrozzell.com/ to learn more.

audiences onto a subway ride toward Flatbush Avenue and Nostrand Avenue, where the train becomes a temporary dance party fueled by music, movement, and the unexpected act of giving money away rather than asking for it. The event concludes with a return gathering at Lips Cafe, where attendees will be offered free food and drinks until our budget runs out!

This performance transforms public transit into a space of celebration, redistribution, and collective joy while responding to rising inflation and disproportionately high unemployment within Black communities. By literally “throwing money at the problem,” the work combines dance, humor, spectacle, and generosity to create a beautiful and unexpected Juneteenth experience that turns an ordinary subway ride into an act of communal care.

This performance is site-specific, acknowledging the seaport’s role in the Transatlantic slave trade. Ships that carried enslaved Africans docked in the area now known as South Street Seaport. At that site, enslaved people, many of whom had been purchased with copper rods in West Africa, disembarked and were sold nearby by white traders and traffickers at the slave market on the corner of Wall Street and Pearl Street. There are no physical monuments at South Street Seaport that acknowledge, mark, or record this history for public memory, but this performance will attempt to create one. 

Stewart used the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases available through the Slave Voyages Database to determine that nearly 11,000 enslaved people disembarked in New York between 1630 and 1775, a period spanning the development of the Dutch settlement New Amsterdam and its transformation into the British colonial port New York City. Many of the city’s earliest mayors invested in ships that carried enslaved people, and by 1730, nearly half of the city’s white settlers directly enslaved Black people. After the Revolutionary War, New York State abolished slavery in 1827, completing a gradual emancipation process that began decades prior in 1799. Still, New York City remained at the center of the illegal transatlantic slave trade well into the start of the Civil War. Although many incorrectly believe that slavery only occurred in the South, enslavement is a defining feature of New York City’s history and development; many of Manhattan’s earliest roads, buildings, and structures, including sites on Governors Island and the 1653 wall that Wall Street is named after, are the products of enslaved labor.