A bankrupt city. A cultural detonation. A new language for art, music, sex, style, and survival. Marlon James and Fab 5 Freddy revisit New York at the moment when economic collapse gave way to explosive invention... when downtown and uptown collided, and the city became a proving ground for forms that would reshape global culture. A conversation about improvisation, danger, glamour, and why the most broken New York was, in some ways, the most alive.
Date
Jun 20, 3:00pm to 4:00pm
Featuring
Marlon James
Marlon James is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction in 2019. His novel A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for first fiction. He is the creator of the five-part HBO thriller, Get Millie Black, adapted from his own short story of the same name.
Fab 5 Freddy
Fab 5 Freddy is an artist, filmmaker, cultural pioneer, and author of the 2026 memoir Everybody’s Fly. Emerging in the late 1970s as a Brooklyn graffiti writer, he was among the first artists to bring graffiti into galleries and museums, helping transform it from a street practice into a global visual language. Alongside figures like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, and Lee Quinones, he was a central force in the downtown New York scene of the 1980s, and a crucial bridge between the worlds of visual art, hip-hop, film, and nightlife.
He co-produced and starred in the landmark film Wild Style, directed music videos for artists including Snoop Dogg, Nas, and Queen Latifah, and became a defining cultural ambassador as the original host of Yo! MTV Raps, the groundbreaking show that helped take hip-hop global. More recently, he produced and directed the Netflix documentary Grass Is Greener. With Everybody’s Fly, he looks back on a life spent at the center of some of the most transformative cultural shifts of the past half-century.
