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When Kamilah Forbes walks into the Apollo Theater with her 5-year-old daughter, the space is transformed by her daughter’s gaze.

It’s probably one of the most magnificent things I’ve been witnessing and experiencing because things are so new and wondrous to her. She reminds me that yes, no, this place is wondrous. There is joy. There are opportunities to be bewildered, to be surprised.

As the Executive Producer of the Apollo since 2016, Kamilah Forbes engages everyday with the ways in which visual art is a cultural, political and personal practice of looking. Forbes—whose work as an award-winning director and producer has won her a Tony Award, NAACP Image Award, The Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Theatre Artist, among others—creates programming for artists and the community that turns the gaze back on the cultural moments of our time in order to create new histories for us to engage with. With an ethos and practice centered in creating Black cultural, affirming spaces, her collaborative, visionary work is curating what she calls the “canon of tomorrow.”

For Forbes, the guiding question of her role as Executive Producer has always been, “what do we want them to say about us in 80 years.” To this end, she is interested in how the Apollo moves the culture forward now. These concerns inform who the Apollo chooses to artistically participate and the kinds of work that they deem as relevant. When Forbes stepped into her position as Executive Producer, she began her project of developing “relationships that are sustainable in a way that deepens artists’ relationship to the institution.”

In order to deepen artists’ connections with their work, Forbes also creates opportunities that sustainably support the artists’ practices. Programs, for example, like the Master Artist’s Residency, where artists like Ta-Nehisi Coates—for whom Forbes produced the on-stage adaptation of Between the World and Me—are in residency for the course of three years. These investments in new work and putting dollars in the hands of Black artists and artists of color, Forbes believes, is what will build a new canon and broaden the community at the Apollo. Regarding her deep belief in reciprocal relationships between artist and institution, Forbes says: 

It’s no longer one way, [i.e.] I perform, I pay you. It’s very much, this is now your home. What can you bring to your home and what can your home bring to you? That was a big part of my mission coming in in 2016, to really expand the scope of what it is we do and how it is we do it…What represents [the Apollo] best is not our architecture, but the people which we invite inside, people…who align themselves with the institution, the people…who see [the Apollo] as home.

As Kamilah Forbes gets to see the Apollo through her daughter’s eyes, we, the audience, have the opportunity to see the cultural moments of our time through hers. “I get jaded,” Forbes says of her time in her transformative role, “I’ve been here a long time, but for [my daughter], she walks in that theater and the stage lights go down and the sparkle starts and I’m like, that’s the magic I fell in love with.”