Arts & Culture

Angélique Kidjo will bring her thrilling voice and stage presence, irresistible music and fluency in multiple cultures and languages to the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square, Somerville, on Friday, February 28, presented by Global Arts Live.

Over the course of his career, playwright August Wilson produced a repertoire examining the condition of Black America. His plays have become canon in the arts world, with some of them going beyond the stage, like his 1985 “Fences,” brought to the big screen by Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in the 2016 award-winning film.

The Boston Public Library is one of the most important public institutions in this city. Though it holds an impressive collection of books and has 25 neighborhood branches to visit, some of the best perks of having a library card aren’t about reading at all.

When Regie Gibson looks back on the history of the United States, he can’t help but notice the integral role music played at every turn. Music, he said, has always been an “embodied expression of the spirit of what was in the hearts of people.”

The classic haunted house trope gets a fresh twist in “Haunted,” a humorous and chilling tale about two Indigenous siblings haunting a house where they died 20 years ago, written and directed by multi-hyphenate Seminole/Mvskoke playwright Tara Moses.

Monday, Jan. 20 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, a celebration and honoring of the work done by the famed civil rights leader. Organizations around Boston are offering free museum admission, family-friendly activities and live performances for the occasion.

Speakeasy Stage and Front Porch Arts Collective are kicking off the January theater season with a laugh. Or rather, with a whole one hour and 40 minutes of laughs.

The task of making a sculptural artwork stretched Michael Berthaud’s imagination. As a game designer, Berthaud was used to working in the digital realm.

Leading British scholar Gary Younge, born to parents from Barbados, writes about Black cultural identity. His latest book, “Dispatches from the Diaspora,” published in November, examines identity “from Nelson Mandela to Black Lives Matter.”

Today it is almost impossible to see what the world was like as an African American teenage boy living in the American South during the Jim Crow era.

Lyric Stage launches into 2025 with “Crumbs From the Table of Joy,” a play by Lynn Nottage that centers the experience of a young woman and her sister navigating the loss of their mother and the remarriage of their father in racially charged 1950s Brooklyn.

Whether you’re searching for community-centric narratives, culturally conscious novels or an escape from reality, there’s something for every reader on this list.