John Brown Lives! abloom this May

WESTPORT | With field trips to the John Brown Farm State Historic Site, artist residencies in area schools, live musical performances, and the annual John Brown Day awards celebration—all in the month of May—John Brown Lives! is abloom. The 2024 Spirit of John Brown Freedom Awardees Dr. Dexter Criss, The Fadden Family, and Amy Godine will be recognized on May 11 at the John Brown Farm, 115 John Brown Road, from 2-4 p.m. Criss is the artistic director of the Plattsburgh State Gospel Choir founded in 2001, bringing uniquely American musical genre to singers and audiences of all ages, on and off the SUNY Plattsburgh campus. Criss is also a distinguished professor of chemistry at the college. For seven decades, the Fadden Family has welcomed thousands of people to the Six Nations Iroquois Cultural Center in Onchiota steeping visitors in Haudenosaunee history, story, culture, and art and reaffirming their traditional values and enduring vitality and presence on this landscape. Godine, independent scholar, researcher, and author of "The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier," first brought the news of the 1846 scheme promoting justice, Black voting rights and land ownership as curator of JBL!'s "Dreaming of Timbuctoo" Exhibition to audiences around the state, forever transforming the public's understanding of the region's history and notions of belonging. John Brown Day is an annual tradition, started in 1922, by Drs. Jesse Max Barber and Spotuas Burwell, Black Philadelphians who made their first of many pilgrimages to Brown's gravesite to lay a wreath on his grave on the anniversary of his birth on May 9, 1800. John Brown Day 2024 will be held outdoors, under a tent, and is open to all. Immediately following, all are welcome to gather at a reception at Lake Placid Pub & Brewery, from 5-7 p.m. For tickets, at $65 per person or $120 for two, email info@johnbrownlives.org. ENLIVENING HISTORY HERE Leading up to John Brown Day, JBL! teaching artists Gale Jackson, Lindsay Pontius and Amy Robinson are in residence in six different schools—three in the Adirondacks and three across Lake Champlain in Vermont—introducing students to the Black settlers of 'Timbuctoo' and the abolitionist Brown family. Grounding the residency program in history and place, the students, their teachers, and the artists visit the John Brown Farm together. Whether working with poetry and collage, theater and movement, bookbinding and creative writing back in the classroom, students explore different ways to express their voice and their views about history, themselves, and their world. With a 2024 local Heritage Grant from the Champlain National Heritage Partnership, poet, storyteller and scholar Jackson is working with elementary students in the Petrova and Bloomingdale schools in the Saranac Lake School District while Pontius, founder/director of Courageous Stage, is bringing professional experience in theater arts to middle school students at Willsboro Central School and Pond Brook School in Addison, Vt. Writer of poetry and prose, Robinson is introducing Vermont students from Vergennes Union High School and fourth- and fifth-graders in the Cornwall School to bookbinding, zine-making and creative writing. Student work will be presented at John Brown Day. YACOUBA ET AL. With a generous Artists in Communities grant from Lake Placid Center for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), musicians Yacouba Sissoko, Jerry Dugger and Taína Asili return to the region to meet with students in Tupper Lake, Elizabethtown, and Keene schools. They will also give evening performances at Keene Arts and the Peony Farm in Whallonsburg. A native of Mali in West Africa, Sissoko is a master kora player from a family of musicians and griots dating back centuries. Now living in New Orleans, guitarist, bassist and vocalist Dugger is a New York Blues Hall Of Fame inductee and a veteran of the New York City Blues community. Asili is a songwriter and bandleader of Puerto Rican descent who combines powerful vocals with an energetic fusion of Afro-Latin, reggae and rock. All three performed at JBL!'s annual Blues at Timbuctoo concert, held every September at the John Brown Farm, in 2022, and will be reunited to share their cultural traditions and explore the power of music to connect people and communities during the week of May 20-24. For more information about the concerts or John Brown Day, to schedule a field trip to the John Brown Farm or find out how you can support JBL!'s work with students and communities, go to www.johnbrownlives.org or email info@johnbrownlives.org.

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John Brown Lives! abloom this May

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