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
CBH Talk | Glenn Adamson Discusses “A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present”
What’s next? For millennia, predicting the future was the province of priests, prophets, astrologers, and seers. Then in the twentieth century futurologists emerged claiming that data and design could make planning a rational certainty. Cultural historian Glenn Adamson writes about…
James Baldwin at 100: Price of the Ticket
Documentary, directed by Karen Thorsen and Douglas K. Dempsey
U.S., 1989, 87 min
Using rarely-seen archival footage from nine different countries, the film melds intimate interviews and eloquent public speeches with cinéma vérité glimpses of Baldwin and original scenes from his…
James Baldwin at 100: From Another Place
Documentary, directed by Sedat Pakay
Turkey, 1973, 12 min
Strikingly shot on the streets of Istanbul, this portrait of the writer and thinker finds him discussing his work, sexuality, and complex feelings about the United States. Followed by a talkback with Brian Meacham on preservation…
James Baldwin at 100: Meeting the Man: Baldwin in Paris
Documentary, directed by Terence Dixon
France/U.K., 1970, 27 min
In 1970, a British film crew set out to make a straightforward literary portrait of James Baldwin set in Paris, insisting on setting aside his political activism. Baldwin bristled at their questions, and the result is a…
James Baldwin at 100: If Beale Street Could Talk
Feature, directed by Barry Jenkins
U.S., 2018, 119 min
Based on the novel by James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk, is the story of Tish, a newly engaged Harlem woman who races against the clock to prove her lover's innocence while carrying their firstborn child to term. It is a…
CBH Talk | The Battle for School Integration in the North
In 1974, two decades after Brown v. Board of Education, another Supreme Court decision – Milliken v. Bradley - effectively brought a halt to school desegregation across the North, shattering 20 years of progress towards equal education for all. The lawsuit, filed by the National…
CBH Talk | David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan Discuss “City Time: On Being Sentenced to Rikers Island”
David Campbell and Jarrod Shanahan both served sentences at Rikers. In their book City Time they offer an unvarnished account of the banality and brutality of incarceration at New York City’s notorious jail.
Campbell and Shanahan reconstruct the daily realities…
CBH Talk | Progress and Preservation: Atlantic Avenue End-to-End
This program is offered in partnership with the Municipal Art Society (MAS), as part of its Enduring Culture Initiative
Atlantic Avenue is one of the most critical corridors in our city. The sole east-west truck route through Brooklyn, it also bifurcates…
A Very Modern Classical Evening with Molière in the Park
Brooklyn's favorite free theater, Molière in the Park is back with a staged reading of Le'Asha Julius' new play The Regulars + Molière's The Ludicrous Ladies!
"Pairing The Regulars, a short tragedy in verse by rapper, actor, and playwright Le’Asha Julius with The Ludicrous Ladies, a one…
Edwidge Danticat Discusses We’re Alone
Tracing a loose arc from Edwidge Danticat’s childhood to the COVID-19 pandemic and recent events in Haiti, the essays gathered in We’re Alone include personal narrative, reportage, and tributes to mentors and heroes such as Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Gabriel García Márquez, and James Baldwin…
CBH’s Brooklyn Trivia Showdown
Think you know Brooklyn history? Well, it’s time to put that to the test at CBH’s Brooklyn Trivia Showdown! From the rise of the Brooklyn Bridge to the rise of Brooklyn pizza, we’ve got the iconic moments, quirky facts, and bizarre tidbits that make this borough the cultural…
Classical Interludes: Aizuri Quartet and Kinan Azmeh
Five Boroughs Music Festival presents Music and Migration, a collaborative program stemming from a deep friendship between the Aizuri Quartet and the Syrian-American clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh. All five of the artists have different personal relationships to and experiences of…
Amitava Kumar Discusses My Beloved Life with Katie Kitamura
An absorbing, exceptionally moving novel that traces the arc of a man’s life, an ordinary life made exceptional by the fact that he has loved and has been loved in turn.
Jadunath Kunwar’s beginnings are humble, even inauspicious. In 1935 in a village near George Orwell’s birthplace, Jadu’…
Jessica Valenti on Abortion
In a stirring and succinct examination of post-Roe America, “one of the most successful and visible feminists of her generation” (Washington Post) takes on what’s become the country’s most resonant political issue.
A KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
In her most urgent book yet,…
Jamieson Webster Discusses On Breathing
Join BPL Presents and Jamieson Webster, who discusses On Breathing: Care in a Time of Catastrophe, a gorgeous, expansive piece of narrative non-fiction about care, dependence, and what it means to breathe in an age of environmental catastrophe.
A few moments after birth we begin to use our…
Ariel Dorfman Discusses Allegro
This thrilling historical mystery starring Mozart tells of friendship and betrayal, and how music allows us to defy death—from the acclaimed author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum.
In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking…
Katie Kitamura Discusses Audition
Join BPL Presents as Katie Kitamura takes the Dweck stage to discuss Audition, an exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.
Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals…
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