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KOLUMN Magazine
Photo, Toya Lillard at the new home of 651 Arts at 10 Lafayette in Brooklyn. “We can determine how best to use the space and how best to serve our community,” she said. Credit, Elias Williams for The New York Times.
A Brooklyn Arts Group Gets Its Own Home, a Place to Defy Gravity
651 Arts, dedicated to African diasporic performance, now has its own space to support work like the choreographer André Zachery’s “Against Gravity.”
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Toya Lillard is not a real estate agent. But she had the practiced patter of one, a few weeks ago, while giving a tour of the new headquarters of 651 Arts, a Brooklyn organization dedicated to African diasporic performance. For an arts administrator, she’s been giving a lot of tours lately.
That’s because Lillard, 651’s executive director, has something to show off. The organization’s bright and shiny new space is across the street from the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Mark Morris Dance Center. It takes up the fourth floor of 10 Lafayette — a city-owned arts complex attached to the 45-story tower at 300 Ashland, which houses luxury apartments, a Whole Foods and an Apple Store. The new digs, which include a black box theater and three rehearsal studios, are as fancy as the neighbors.
More significant than the grandeur, though, is that for the first time in its 37-year history, 651 has a home of its own. “The space allows 651 Arts the opportunity to control their own destiny,” said Mikki Shepard, one of its founders.
Instead of always having to find places for its artists to rehearse and perform, 651 is now “at the helm,” Lillard said. “We can determine how best to use the space and how best to serve our community.”