5th Annual Afro Latino Festival Gets Spotlight on STATE OF THE ARTS This Today

This weekend, the 5th Annual Afro Latino Festival will take place at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, based in Harlem. Additional satellite programs will also be held in the neighborhoods of DUMBO and Bed-Sty, Brooklyn.

Advanced scholarship has closed important information gaps about the Atlantic Slave Trade. It's now known that 90% of the 11.2 million slaves, taken from the African continent, were in fact brought to Central and South America. Only 450,000 slaves were sent to South Carolina in North America via brief stays in the Caribbean.

Such revelations offer new opportunities to explore Afro-Latino culture & lifestyle on many levels. State of the Arts will bring Wynnie Lamour, Founder of the Haitian Creole Institute to talk about Creole and Patois languages that are wide-spread throughout the Caribbean and both Americas. DiAnne Smith, visual artist and contributor to State of the Arts will share insights into the Garifuna culture located in Belize. The show will talk with Jake Kheel and Juan Mejia Botero co-directors for the full-length documentary film, "Death By A Thousand Cuts" which explores ongoing border disputes between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We end our program with Ayanna Legros, graduate of Africana Studies at New York University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Fernando Prud'homme, cultural critic on religious practices in the diaspora.

State of the Arts NYC is a weekly radio show on WBAI radio, 99.5FM, where various sectors of NYC's arts worlds converge to report and analyze the dynamic state of the arts and its participants. Hosted by Savona Bailey-McClain, long-time Executive Director of the West Harlem Art Fund (WHAF), she confronts, analyzes and celebrates victories, challenges and changes in the country's dynamic creative capital. Reports from the field; from the far-flung fringes; from center stage and from behind the scenes-the host Savona Bailey-McClain draws on her 20 years' in the trenches to bring you snapshot after snapshot in living color. State of the Arts NYC airs live WBAI FM Radio, wbai.org and tune in Fridays from 5-6 p.m. We can also be heard on iTunes, Mixcloud and YouTube.