DOWNTOWN
BROOKLYN
ARTS FESTIVAL 2022
Friday, September 30 +
Saturday, October 1
Discover the epicenter of Brooklyn’s arts and culture
The Downtown Brooklyn Arts Festival (DBAF) is an annual celebration of Downtown Brooklyn’s cultural community and the artists who inspire the borough’s creative spirit.
DBAF 2022 takes place Friday, September 30th and Saturday, October 1st. Acclaimed arts organizations from across the Brooklyn Cultural District will share programming at The Plaza at 300 Ashland with exciting performances, workshops, and family programming.
Read full recaps of DBAF 2021, DBAF 2020, DBAF 2019, and DBAF 2018.
#DBAF2022
DBAF ON THE PLAZA
FRIDAY 9/30
4:00 - 8:00 PM
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Presented by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Conjunction Arts, the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art, and the Burchfield Penney Art Center.
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4:00 PMDowntown Brooklyn Partnership (DBP) and Dumbo Improvement District (Dumbo) unveil Witnessing (2022), a new public art installation created by artist Bradley McCallum.
One of the projects funded through the Downtown Brooklyn + Dumbo Art Fund, Witnessing transforms the emergency call boxes that were once a fixture on city sidewalks to memorialize victims of police brutality while bringing attention to the ongoing fight to end racism, violence, and the abuse of power within the criminal justice system.
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Presented by Mark Morris Dance Group.
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4:00 - 5:00 PMJoin Mark Morris Dance Group’s Kim Holmes as she demonstrates and teaches house music dance moves.
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Presented by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Soul Summit Music.
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5:00 - 8:00 PMThe legendary and intergenerational Soul Summit DJ collective spins the most soulful and dynamic dance music.
SATURDAY 10/1
11:00 AM - 8:00 PM
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Presented by Mark Morris Dance Group.
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11:00 AM - 11:45 AMMark Morris Dance Group offers a free kids’ hip-hop dance class. Register here.
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Presented by The Center for Fiction and the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.
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12:00 to 12:45 PMIn honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, BKCM & CFF are presenting a children's musical storytime with author Areli Morales, who will read from her book “Areli is a Dreamer” with music performed by BKCM Faculty and Musicians Ivan Arteaga, Sebastian Cruz, Stomu Takeishi. More info.
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Presented by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Photoville.
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1:00 - 5:00 PMPhotoville brings the work of interdisciplinary artist, Tiffany Smith, to The Plaza with a PhotoCube showcasing some of Tiffany's work from "Throned," and an interactive "Photo-Booth" open to the public where visitors can have their photos taken (which can then be downloaded from a link for free).
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Presented by Brooklyn Music School.
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1:00 - 1:45 PMA special musical performance by the students of Brooklyn Music School.
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Presented by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
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2:00 - 2:45 PMBrooklyn’s orchestral darlings, The Knights, are guaranteed to fascinate loyal followers and engage new listeners. The New Yorker Magazine hails them as “one of Brooklyn’s sterling cultural products known far beyond the borough for their relaxed virtuosity and expansive repertory.”
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Presented in partnership with 651 Arts.
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3:00 - 3:45 PMDJ Brina Payne is a Brooklyn-based open format DJ who has displayed her talents for diverse audiences across the city and celebrates the best from all musical genres.
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Presented by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
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4:00 - 4:45 PMAfro Dominicano, the Brooklyn-based band, is the synthesis of folkloric Dominican genres, pop and rock music. Their sound is at the forefront of Afro Caribbean Soul.
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Presented by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
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5:00 - 5:45 PMSample Sale Music featuring Tai Allen are a funk-soul-jazz fusion collective of musicians. Together, they explore music samples in their original context and then transform them into the hip-hop tracks audiences know and love.
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Presented by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
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6:00 - 8:00 PMWorld-renowned DJ, producer, artist, and remixer DJ Spinna closes DBAF with his “Flavors” sets featuring the best in music from the ‘80s, ’90s, as well as sprinkles of ‘00s.
DISCOVER THE BROOKLYN
CULTURAL DISTRICT
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PMLocation
63 Flushing Ave., Building 92, Historic Commandant’s ResidenceA permanent exhibition that tells the story of the Brooklyn Navy Yard from 1801, when it was founded as one of the nation’s first federal shipyards, through to the site’s use today as an active industrial and innovation hub home to nearly 500 businesses.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PMLocation
41 Flushing Ave., Building 77 + 63 Flushing Ave., Building 92Home to innovators, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and artists, the Yard has been an atmosphere of invention since its founding as a shipyard in 1801. Today, the Yard is home to more than 500 businesses in fields as diverse as art and design to technology and biomedical sciences. This nearly half-mile installation celebrates those businesses and the incredible contributions they make to Brooklyn.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 11:00 AM - 5:00 PMLocation
41 Flushing Ave., Building 77 + 63 Flushing Ave., Building 92Home to innovators, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, and artists, the Yard has been an atmosphere of invention since its founding as a shipyard in 1801. Today, the Yard is home to more than 500 businesses in fields as diverse as art and design to technology and biomedical sciences. This nearly half-mile installation celebrates those businesses and the incredible contributions they make to Brooklyn.
More info.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 7:30 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 7:30 PMLocation
BAM Strong Harvey TheaterA village. A film crew. Six shacks. One dead sheep.
Anarchistic Belgian theater collective FC Bergman brings the full force of their chaotic, poetic brilliance to BAM with a theatrical and cinematic work of epic proportions. With some Old Testament inspiration (the title refers to the dimensions of Noah’s Ark), they transform the Harvey Theater into a village in the woods, where live animals, a gigantic cast, and six small houses clustered around a pond. As a film crew circles the scene—revealing the wild humor and grotesque secrets that lurk behind closed doors—these stories build to an unforgettable fever pitch in the face of an oncoming flood.
Note: This show includes nudity, sexual content, and violence.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 11:00 AM - 7:30 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 11:30 AM - 7:30 PMLocation
Agnes Varis Art Center, 647 Fulton St.Christina Massey will be exhibiting her mixed media glass and repurposed aluminum sculptures in a new colorful installation that activates the UrbanGlass Window Gallery. Created at UrbanGlass with a grant from the Brooklyn Arts Foundation in 2019, this series is a more representational selection of her larger body of work. The work addresses the potential effects of climate change on vegetation over time due to industries like fracking. The works have an oddness and mysteriousness to them, almost acting like crystal balls, where we look within for answers which are obstructed by reflections and patterns which distract us with their aesthetic beauty.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 7:30 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 2:00 PM and 7:30 PMLocation
Polonsky Shakespeare CenterIn an acclaimed, tour-de-force solo performance, David Strathairn portrays World War II hero and Holocaust witness Jan Karski, who risked his life to carry his report of the Warsaw ghetto from war-torn Poland to the Allied Nations and the Oval Office only to be disbelieved.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 8:00 PMLocation
509 Atlantic Ave.The Orchestre National de Jazz and IRCAM present Ex Machina, a creation conceived by the American saxophonist Steve Lehman and Frédéric Maurin, artistic director of the ONJ.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 11:00 AM - 9:00 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PMLocation
BRIC House Hallway, 647 Fulton St.Painted streetscapes that embrace resilience and depict Black presence through intimacy, love, and care. Titled after the Pop Smoke song, this work can be viewed as an ode to the meteoric rise of the hip-hop star and his recent tragic death at the age of 20, or a memorial to the many tragic deaths over the past two years due to Covid. Yet this large-scale landscape created by Cuban-Haitian-American painter Na’ye Perez is instead the backdrop, speaking to the overlooked, the everyday, the celebration of life and a community that gives rise to musicians like Pop and his Hip Hop style, Brooklyn Drill.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 11:00 AM - 9:00 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PMLocation
BRIC House Hallway, 647 Fulton St.Rodrigo Valenzuela works across photography, sculpture, installation, and video to construct scenes that function simultaneously as documents and fictions, and that reflect his ongoing interests in examining industrial and post-industrial concepts of work and the contemporary realities of laborer. For his photographs, he constructs elaborate tableaux out of urban detritus, much of it found in scrap yards, such as cinder blocks, pipes, wooden palettes, corrugated metal, and two-by-fours. The resulting large-scale black-and-white photographs resemble miniature ruins, images that feel familiar yet distant, and that suggest spaces of abandonment, alienation, and displacement.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 11:00 AM - 9:00 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 11:00 AM - 7:00 PMLocation
BRIC House Hallway, 647 Fulton St.Contemporary Artist Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo-Ross, Earth & Iron: Archival Visions of Land and Struggle brings together past and present notions of revolution, liberation, and land sovereignty. With painted and collaged images based on early twentieth-century colonial photography taken in West Africa and the Caribbean, Adeyemo-Ross reaches into the past to envision alternative futures.
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Time
Friday Sept. 30, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Saturday Oct. 1, 9:00 AM - 5:00 PMLocation
Lobby of 115 Myrtle Avenue (15 MetroTech), Brooklyn CommonsFor the Bodies at Rest exhibition, artists Alexa Williams & Crystal Gregory will use the large columns in the lobby of 115 Myrtle Avenue at Brooklyn Commons, as a giant loom, weaving together a gridded network composed of two divergent parts: the warp (lengthwise) and the weft (transverse).
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Time
All DayLocation
Columbus Park near Tillary StFred Wilson’s first ever large-scale public installation acts in conversation with surrounding historical monuments and buildings. The use of ornamental gates and fences serves as a metaphor for security and gated communities, insecurity, the incarceration of Black men, the detainment of immigrants, policing, and William Blake’s concept of “Mind Forg’d Manacles” — self-created barriers to personal and societal growth and freedom, built by fear, division, and perceptions of difference. These gates, whether they are to keep others out or keep someone in, act as reflections on the separation of people, both physically and mentally.
Funded through the Downtown Brooklyn + Dumbo Art Fund.
More info here.
GETTING TO THE PLAZA
The Plaza at 300 Ashland is located near 300 Ashland Place, at the corner of Lafayette and Flatbush Avenues.
By Subway
2 3 4 5 B Q R N D to Atlantic Avenue / Barclays Center
C to Lafayette Avenue
G to Fulton Street
By Bus
B25, B26, B41, B45, B52, B63, B67, all stop within three blocks of the plaza.
By Train
The Long Island Railroad stops at Atlantic Terminal, approximately one block away from the plaza.
PRESENTED BY
Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is a not-for-profit local development corporation that serves as the primary champion for Downtown Brooklyn as a world-class business, cultural, educational, residential, and retail destination. Working together with the three business improvement district it manages, the Partnership’s diverse activities include attracting new businesses and improving the environment for existing companies, facilitating the construction of public spaces and streetscapes that promote an active and cohesive community, supporting and promoting Downtown Brooklyn’s cultural assets, and encouraging a sense of place and an engaged civic community.
The Plaza at 300 Ashland is located right in the heart of the Brooklyn Cultural District. In partnership with Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, members of the local arts community come together to bring vibrant arts programming out into the public as a part of Downtown Brooklyn Presents, a lineup of free, high-quality activities and cultural events.
Programming on The Plaza at 300 Ashland is made possible with support from Two Trees Management Co.
