Inside Brooklyn’s Black Future Festival, Where Children Imagine The Next 100 Years Of Black History

BROOKLYN, NY— As Black History Month reaches its 100th anniversary, Brooklyn Children’s Museum is turning its focus forward.

From February 15 through February 21, the museum will host its annual Black Future Festival, a weeklong slate of performances, workshops, and hands-on programs designed to give children and families space to imagine the next century of Black creativity, resilience, and innovation.

The festival runs during New York City public schools’ midwinter recess and fills the museum’s galleries with movement, sound, and art-making. Children will move between hip-hop and house dance sessions, Afrofuturistic collage workshops, printmaking studios, yoga classes and music labs, building projects that center identity and imagination.

This year’s theme, “Black Resilience: Growing in Tough Terrain,” anchors the programming in stories of adaptation and creativity across the African diaspora. Guest artists and educators lead sessions that draw connections between history and the present, encouraging young participants to see themselves as active shapers of what comes next.

Brooklyn Children’s Museum partnered with guest curator Kendra J. Ross and STooPS Art & Community, a Bed-Stuy–based outdoor arts organization known for block parties, classes, and creative projects in unconventional spaces. Ross, a dancer and choreographer whose work has been presented internationally, returns to the museum after collaborating on previous festivals.

The schedule includes “Silver Linings: Triumph of Loss,” a multidisciplinary dance work by KJB Works that explores grief through movement and celebration; block printing sessions that culminate in a collective mural; Afrofuturistic collage-making inspired by film and music; and vision board workshops that use the symbolism of roots and trees to explore growth and possibility.

Other programs invite children to create portraits inspired by Brooklyn artist Mickalene Thomas, learn Black history through printmaking stencils of figures such as Serena Williams and Bessie Coleman, experiment with rhythm and sound using world instruments and dance through Brooklyn’s past, present, and future.

“As Black History Month turns 100, we’re asking, ‘Who decides what the next 100 years looks like?’” Atiba T. Edwards, president and chief executive officer of Brooklyn Children’s Museum, said. “BCM’s Black Future Festival gives kids the answer: they should and will.”

Ross described the festival as an extension of STooPS’ mission to build community through art. “Our goal is to provide a space where young people can see themselves as the architects of the next century, using their inherent creativity and resilience to shape a bold, innovative future,” she said.

The Black Future Festival runs daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with museum admission covering all activities. General admission costs $15, with discounted tickets available for grandparents and free entry for children under 1.

Founded in 1899, Brooklyn Children’s Museum is the world’s first children’s museum and New York City’s largest cultural institution dedicated to families. Based in Crown Heights, the museum serves hundreds of thousands of children and caregivers each year through programs rooted in arts, culture and joyful learning.