BPL Presents is BPL’s curated cultural program, with arts and culture offerings including author talks, live performances, music, film and visual art exhibitions that explore the critical issues of our time in Brooklyn and beyond.
Center for Brooklyn History
Brooklyn's culture past and present from the Center for Brooklyn History
Upcoming
Environmental Injustice: Race, Class, and Toxic Inequality | The Present Crisis
Join us for Part 2 of a three-part series exploring the intersection of racial inequality and the environment. This time we explore the situation today. Leaders from across the country share solutions to environmental crises within their communities and discuss a new urgent challenge…
Opening the Archives: Finding LGBTQ+ History in the CBH Collections
When author Hugh Ryan researched his 2019 book When Brooklyn Was Queer, he delved deep into the archives at the Center for Brooklyn History. Queer history is rarely neatly labeled in finding aids or research guides. And so Hugh brought a queer lens to an array of seemingly unrelated…
CBH Talk | Rules and Rutabagas: A Conversation about the Park Slope Food Coop with Joe Holtz, Sun Yu, and Alexandra Schwartz
In the early 1970s, a remarkable experiment in collective action took root in Park Slope: the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC). Founded in 1973 as a members-only, collectively-run buying club, the Coop has grown over 52 years into the largest single store food cooperative in the United…
QVNYC Presents: "The Ball" a film by MALGORZATA SANIEWSKA
Join us on Monday, June 23rd at the Dweck Center of Brooklyn Public Library for a special screening of The Ball, hosted by Queer Voices NYC in celebration of Pride Month. Narrated by ballroom icon Jack Mizrahi Gucci, this powerful documentary offers an intimate look into the underground ballroom…
Plaza Performance: Bahia Beats
Nothing gets your energy up and your whole body moving like the joyful rhythms of Bahia, Brazil. Dive into the irresistible sounds of "BAHIA BEATS," led by Carlos Almeida, a veteran of Brazilian music who has played with Jorje Aragão, Jorje Ben Jor, Martinho da Vila, Jair Rodrigues — and pretty…
The Architectural League of New York presents Drawing Together
Join The Architectural League of New York and the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) for “Drawing Together,” a celebration of design and the public imagination. A vibrant public realm is only possible when people from different walks of life come together to dream, design, and build. "Drawing…
Just Conversations | The Welcome Myth: Immigration and America’s Contradictions
About Just ConversationsJust Conversations is a series co-presented by the Center for Brooklyn History and Brooklyn Org that brings into dialogue issues facing our borough, city, and society and gives voice to the change makers who move us towards a more equitable future.Special thanks to…
Nicola Kraus and Amy Shearn Discuss The Best We Could Hope For & Animal Instinct
Join us for a discussion with Nicola Kraus and Amy Shearn on their new books: The Best We Could Hope For and Animal Instinct.
In The Best We Could Hope For, when Bunny Linden abandons her three children with…
Environmental Injustice: Race, Class, and Toxic Inequality | The Way Forward
The final program in this three-part series on the intersection of racial inequality and the environment looks ahead. Join us in imagining a future free from the race and class based divides that determine who is — and isn’t — protected from toxins, pollutants, flooding, and the…
Tove Jansson & The Responsibility of Children’s Literature
Authors, illustrators and editors come together to unpack Tove Jansson's influential work and consider the field of children's literature more broadly as an invocation into citizenship. M.T. Anderson, Lauren LeBlanc, Dr. Raquel Ortiz and Tracy Hurren will raise important, even difficult…
Brooklyn Bee: A Spelling Competition
Think you know how to spell Brooklyn? Prove it one word at a time!Join us for the first ever Brooklyn-centric spelling bee, hosted by your resident experts at the Center for Brooklyn History. From historic names to iconic avenues, we are finding the most interesting and…
Plaza Performance: DJ Max Glazer
Max Glazer has represented New York City touring the world DJing parties for superstars like Naomi Campbell, Puff Daddy, Missy Elliott, 50 Cent, Branford Marsalis, and Jay-Z, to name just a few. Separate from the glamorous celebrity parties he was known for, Max was always cultivating…
Summer Screenings | The Amazing Garden: A Film and Conversation on Community Gardening in NYC
Join us for an evening celebrating the legacy and future of New York City’s community gardens, inspired by the short film The Amazing Garden, produced and directed by Hiroko Tadano Neely and Deb Levine. The film tells the story of how, thirty years ago, a group of passionate neighbors…
Stacey Abrams Discusses Coded Justice
BPL Presents welcomes nationally renowned author and leader Stacey Abrams, who discusses her latest thriller. Coded Justice follows the returning protagonist Avery down a dark rabbit hole into the breathtaking—and dangerously evolving—world of AI in the medical industry.
Former Supreme…
Summer Screenings | Gowanus Current
Join us for a screening of the documentary film Gowanus Current followed by a talkback with the filmmakers Jamie Courville and Chris Reynolds.
A century and a half of industrial waste and raw sewage has turned Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal into one of the nation’s…
Miriam Toews Discusses A Truce That is Not Peace
BPL Presents welcomes internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews, whose memoir of the will to write is a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.
“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City…
Art Spiegelman Discusses MetaMaus
BPL Presents is delighted to welcome Pulitzer-Prize winner Art Spiegelman to discuss the MetaMaus paperback.
In the pages of MetaMaus, Spiegelman re-enters Maus, the the Pulitzer Prize–winning modern classic that has altered how we see literature, comics, and the Holocaust ever since…
Lance Richardson Discusses True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
BPL Presents welcomes Lance Richardson and this first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement.
Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure…
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