This week, Black art and culture continue to demonstrate that influence is not confined to the gallery, the stage or the screen. Across institutions and creative platforms, the people shaping culture are increasingly moving into positions where they can alter how resources are distributed, whose histories are preserved and which stories are allowed to occupy the center.
From the Prince Claus Fund’s internationally minded jury to a new leadership role for Bryan Joseph Lee in New York’s cultural administration, questions of access, equity and cultural power remain close to the surface. In Philadelphia, Maori Karmael Holmes’ work across the Barnes Foundation and the BlackStar Film Festival offers another model: one in which Black cinema, memory, and institutional practice can exist in conversation rather than in isolation. Meanwhile, the Zora Legacy Awards turn the spotlight on writers expanding the possibilities of Black literature. At the same time, Tems’ growing role in Hollywood’s musical landscape signals the increasingly consequential place of African artists in global storytelling.
This week’s stories point to a cultural landscape in motion, one where Black artists, curators, writers, producers, and cultural strategists are not simply participating in existing systems but helping to reshape them.
Prince Claus Fund Names Jury for 2026 Impact Award
The Prince Claus Fund has assembled an international jury to select the recipient of its 2026 Prince Claus Impact Award, bringing together three figures whose practices span curating, contemporary art and activist research.
The jury includes Senegalese curator Fatima Bintou Rassoul SY, Ghanaian artist and cultural instigator Ibrahim Mahama, and Peruvian interdisciplinary artist and activist Daniela Ortiz. Their practices are notably grounded in questions of cultural memory, historical power, community and the politics of representation.
The composition of the jury is significant. Rather than drawing exclusively from conventional institutional leadership, the selection foregrounds practitioners whose work has engaged questions of place, identity and social transformation from different geographical and intellectual positions.
The Prince Claus Impact Award recognizes an artist or cultural practitioner whose work responds to pressing local realities while generating meaningful and lasting social change. The jury will now assess the international field of nominees before the recipient is announced on September 6.
The award forms part of the Prince Claus Fund’s broader commitment to supporting artists and cultural practitioners whose work contributes to social and cultural change, particularly in contexts that have historically received limited institutional attention.
The jury will return to Amsterdam in November for Awards Week, when the award and its accompanying public conversations will bring the selected practitioner’s work into wider focus.
Bryan Joseph Lee Joins New York’s Cultural Affairs Leadership
New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs has appointed cultural strategist and producer Bryan Joseph Lee as its new deputy commissioner, placing a longtime advocate for artists and marginalized communities inside one of the country’s most influential municipal arts agencies.
Lee will work alongside Commissioner Diya Vij as the department oversees an expanded cultural budget and develops new approaches to supporting the city’s creative sector. His responsibilities include helping shape the city’s cultural funding portfolio, working on the new $10 million Cultural Stability Fund, supporting Materials for the Arts and advancing DCLA’s racial-equity commitments.
The appointment comes at a consequential moment for New York’s cultural sector. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has approved $323 million for cultural affairs for fiscal year 2027—the largest annual allocation in DCLA’s history.
Lee brings experience across independent cultural production and major institutions. Through his Harlem-based consultancy CNTR ARTS, founded in 2021, he has worked with organizations including Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, Ghetto Film School and For the Gworls. Previously, he led the Public Forum at The Public Theater, producing more than 75 programs focused on civic dialogue and social engagement.
His appointment suggests a growing emphasis on cultural policy that understands artists not simply as beneficiaries of public funding but as essential to the city’s social infrastructure.
In Philadelphia, Black Cinema and Art Turn Toward Memory and Freedom
Philadelphia became a particularly charged meeting point for Black visual culture this summer as the Barnes Foundation’s Freedom Dreams coincided with the 15th edition of the BlackStar Film Festival.
Co-curated by Barnes executive James Claiborne and Maori Karmael Holmes, Founder, Chief Executive, and Artistic Officer of BlackStar Projects, Freedom Dreams brought together moving-image and installation works by Arthur Jafa, David Hartt, Garrett Bradley, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Tourmaline. The exhibition, which ran through August 9, explored Black history, archives, memory and the possibilities of liberation.
That conversation extended into BlackStar, which returned August 6–9 with 91 films from more than 30 countries. Among them was Holmes’ own Scene Not Heard: Women in Philadelphia Hip-Hop, her 2006 documentary about women including Bahamadia, Ursula Rucker, Lady B and Dyana Williams whose contributions complicated the way Philadelphia’s hip-hop history had been recorded.
The juxtaposition was more than coincidental. Both projects ask who gets to construct the archive and what becomes possible when Black people move from being subjects of historical narratives to their authors and image-makers.
For Holmes, whose work spans filmmaking, curating, programming and institution-building, that question has become a through-line. In Philadelphia this summer, cinema and contemporary art became adjoining spaces for examining inheritance, erasure, resistance and the right to imagine otherwise.
Zora Legacy Awards Spotlight the Year’s Black Literary Talent
The 2026 finalists for the Zora Legacy Awards have been announced, bringing 12 books into contention across debut fiction, fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
Formerly known as the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, the prizes are presented by the Hurston/Wright Foundation and recognise recognize outstanding work by Black writers in the United States and internationally. The awards were renamed in 2025 in honour honor of Zora Neale Hurston, while retaining the literary legacy associated with Richard Wright.
This year’s debut fiction finalists are Justin Haynes for Ibis, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo for The Tiny Things Are Heavier, and Princess Joy L. Perry for This Here Is Love. Fiction nominees are Harmonia Rosales for Chronicles of Ori, Lauren Francis-Sharma for Casualties of Truth, and Jason Mott for People Like Us.
The nonfiction field includes Danielle Bainbridge’s Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays, Jonathan Capehart’s Yet Here I Am, and Lindsey Stewart’s The Conjuring of America. Poetry finalists are Doug Kearney’s I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always, Shane McCrae’s New and Collected Hell: A Poem, and Golden’s Reprise.
Among previous recipients are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Colson Whitehead, Alain Mabanckou, Chris Abani and Aminatta Forna. The winners will be announced at the 25th annual awards gala in Washington, D.C., on October 9.
Tems Takes a Major Musical Role in Children of Blood and Bone
Tems is taking her place behind the music of one of Hollywood’s most anticipated African-inspired fantasy films.
The Nigerian singer has been appointed executive music producer and curator for Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Children of Blood and Bone, the Paramount adaptation of Tomi Adeyemi’s bestselling novel. Prince-Bythewood recently revealed that Tems’ songs “Try Me” and Burna Boy’s “Alone” were among the tracks she repeatedly listened to while developing the film, which inspired her to ask Tems to shape its soundtrack.
Tems is also expected to contribute three original songs. Burna Boy joins the project as an executive music consultant, while Fireboy DML, BNXN and Ayra Starr are also part of the soundtrack’s wider musical landscape.
Prince-Bythewood described Tems as the first woman to executive-produce a soundtrack “at this level”—a claim best understood as the director’s characterization of the appointment rather than a formally established industry record.
The collaboration is particularly fitting for a film whose world is rooted in West African mythology and whose story follows Zélie, played by South African-born Nigerian actor Thuso Mbedu, as she fights to restore magic to the kingdom of Orïsha. The film also features Viola Davis, Idris Elba, Regina King, Cynthia Erivo and Damson Idris.
Children of Blood and Bone is scheduled for theatrical release on January 15, 2027, including IMAX engagements.
