The Allen Center Will Host FOREVER FREE in Honor of Juneteenth

The Allen Center in Newton, MA, will celebrate Juneteenth with Forever Free, a  concert of music that honors freedom and equality on June 19th with performances at 2 pm and 6 pm. Tickets and more information can be found at newtonculture.org. 

Forever Free commemorates the end of slavery in the United States with music that celebrates Black-American artists and culture.  Grammy nominated vocalist Donna McElroy, and cellist Allison Eldredge (The Allen Center’s Artist in Residence), along with Odie Teken (keyboard), John Lockwood (bass), and Jorge Perez-Albela (drums) will perform works that range from traditional spirituals to jazz and the sounds of Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Sam Cooke, and contemporary composers Allison Loggins-Hull and Adolphus Hailstork. 

“We are proud to present this concert at The Allen Center, which is named for Nathaniel Topliff Allen, a prominent 19th-century educator, abolitionist, and philanthropist,” said the center’s Executive Director Adrienne Hartzell . “When he purchased the homestead in 1854, he founded the West Newton English and Classical School, providing equal educational opportunities for girls as well as boys in racially mixed classes even before the Civil War.”  

The Allen Center will also host a gallery exhibition by Boston-based photographer Lou Jones entitled panAFRICAproject through August 1.  The exhibit creates a contemporary visual portrait of modern Africa using photography and heretofore unavailable technologies with a repository of images representing each of the 54 individual countries devoid of the preconceived Western notions of Africa, documenting an accurate picture of the highlights and inner workings of the most progressive twenty-first-century continent.

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