Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire Will Award Citizen of the Year to Napoleon Jones-Henderson at the 17th Annual Black New England Conference
Portsmouth, NH: The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire (BHTNH) will host the 17th Annual Black New England Conference (BNEC) in partnership with Northeastern University and the Reckonings Project. At each conference, the BHTNH Citizen of the Year award is given to a member of the community who has made an exceptional contribution to the community and has been a role model for others. This year, the award will be presented on Friday, October 20, 2023, to Napoleon Jones-Henderson at the awards dinner and keynote speaker address.
The virtual and in-person conference will be held at the Fenway Center at Northeastern University in Boston, MA on October 20th and 21st. The BNEC is a 2-day conference held annually that brings together scholars, artists, activists, and community members to share research and insights on Black experiences past, present, and future in New England and beyond.
The 2023 theme is “I, Too, Sing: Art, Music, and Writing in Our BIPOC Communities.” The conference will focus on how BIPOC artists use art, music, and writing to empower themselves and others.
BHTNH chose Napoleon Jones-Henderson as this year’s Citizen of the Year award recipient because of his decades-long commitment to promoting the arts in the Black community.
Napoleon Jones-Henderson was born in 1943 in Chicago, Illinois. In 1963, Jones-Henderson was accepted into an independent study program in French Art History and Figure Drawing at the Sorbonne Student Continuum-Student and Artist Center in Paris. He then earned his B.F.A. degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1971 and his M.F.A. degree in Interdisciplinary Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005.
In 1969, at the height of the Chicago Black Arts Movement, Jones-Henderson became a founding member of the Chicago collective AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists). During his time at the collective, Jones-Henderson created large pictorial woven tapestries that were showcased at the group’s series of exhibitions. The 2011 documentary AfriCOBRA: Art for the People, produced by the TV Land Network, chronicled AfriCOBRA’s history and its many contributions to the 1960s Black Arts Movement.
Jones-Henderson serves as Executive Director of the Research Institute of African and African Diaspora Arts, Inc. and BENNU ARTS, LLC and has received many awards for his artwork and curatorial efforts championing Black Art internationally, among them the 2015 Boston Foundation’s “Brother Thomas Fellowship” and the Merit of Honor Award from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. His work has been shown widely at prestigious institutes and museums, such as the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Museum of NCAAA and Studio Museum in Harlem; the Library of Congress; the 2018 58th Venice Biennale; and the ICA in Boston. His work has also been commissioned for multiple private collections and numerous public art installations. Most recently, Jones-Henderson was a 2022 ARTADIA Boston Awardee.
Jones-Henderson is honored to be the 2023 Citizen of the Year award recipient. “Thank you, BHTNH, for such an awesome recognition and honor. I am very appreciative of your thinking of me in such a manner. I have lived my life as a co-collaborator with others. It is always in an effort to uplift and inspire others. And be so, inspired and uplifted by others as well.”
“BHTNH has been a stalwart collaborator all these many years in bringing illumination to the heroic voices and lives of African peoples in New England and beyond. And [they] have allowed me the opportunity to join you in this journey toward the greater good of humanity.”
The Black New England Conference will be held in person at the Fenway Center at Northeastern University in Boston, MA, but the programs can also be accessed virtually. For more information and to register, please visit: https://blackheritagetrailnh.org/black-new-england-conference-2023/
