Professor Lynn Nottage is featured in a new sculpture series at Brooklyn’s Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art. Located in MoCADA’s Ubuntu Community Sculpture Garden, a recent addition to the Museum, the sculpture series is mounted on a wall beneath a mural of the late art and music critic Greg Tate, down the street from the Museum’s central building. The series, Brooklyn Bronzes, depicts the bronze likenesses of twenty important Black Brooklynites and, as an on-going series, will eventually immortalize over 80 individuals.
Brooklyn Bronzes’s creator, architect and artist Kholisile Dhliwayo noted the historical significance of the series, stating “Brooklyn Bronzes is an ode to the generative legacies that have affirmed the agency of Black communities in Brooklyn, paying tribute to the leaders and elders among us, who through their work nurture and protect Black bodies, cultural practices, and knowledge systems.”
Historically notable, as well, is the the title of the series which alludes to the Benin Bronzes, an artistically important collection of Fifteen and Sixteenth Century bronze masks created by artists in the Kingdom of Benin, located in current-day Nigeria, which were seized by the British Empire when they annexed Benin in the mid-Nineteenth Century. The Benin Bronzes are still displayed by the British Museum.
The sculpture of Nottage, who grew up in the Boerum Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, will be featured alongside bronze sculptures of Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for the City of New York Laurie Cumbo, gallery-founder Richard Beavers, and attorney Elizabeth Yeampierre, among others.
The series is a part of MoCADA’s permanent collection, and can be viewed at MoCADA Ubuntu Garden, 48 Lafayette Avenue Brooklyn.
