Arts & Culture

While she has been winning wide acclaim for some time as a collaborator, Debo Ray felt it was time to cut her teeth by cutting her own tracks.

James Baldwin’s inkwell, Malcolm X’s tape recorder, a lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair. These are some of the physical manifestations of Black history, oppression and transcendence that artist Wendel White photographed for his book “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies” and the eponymous exhibition the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University.

Anyone with artistic inclinations (or an overly ambitious to-do list) knows that some works don’t get finished. Some canvases are painted over, some rolls of film lay dormant and some musical compositions get dissected and redistributed to other songs.

Black History Month and Valentine’s Day meet during “Black Joy! Celebrating Black Excellence in Opera and Art Song,” a brunch performance by Opera on Tap lauding Black love and joy through music.

Indigenous history meets contemporary technology in “List Projects 31: Kite,” an installation by Oglála Lakhóta artist Kite at the MIT List Visual Arts Center.

In 1967 the world saw firsthand the horrors of Black life under apartheid South Africa in photojournalist and street photographer Ernest Cole’s, unflinching photobook, “House of Bondage.”

The 67th Grammy Awards kicked off Black History Month in grand style.

While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may be known for pioneering digital computing and space exploration (among other realms), there is also a very artistic side to the institute.

Artist John Wilson, the sculptor behind “Eternal Presence” at the National Center for Afro-American Artists, has been a revered artistic figure in Roxbury for decades. A new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts aims to showcase Wilson’s talent on a national scale.

Highlighting Black talent is the central mission of the second annual We Black Folk Fest at Club Passim in Cambridge, a two-day festival in February honoring the West African griot tradition through concerts and artist talks.

Boston-based pianist and composer Jesse Taitt is performing a solo set on Thursday, Feb. 13, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square through GBH Jazz Nights.

The stage at the Emerson Paramount Center is primed for a story of epic proportions.