HBO DOCUMENTARY ON BLACK ART
Local collector Bernard Lumpkin is one of the sources in HBO’s recent documentary “Black Art: In the Absence of Light,” streaming now. Inspired by the late David Driskell’s landmark 1976 exhibition “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the film also features Faith Ringgold, Amy Sherald and Carrie Mae Weems. My favorite line: “I just stay out till I get in.”

BLACK HISTORY MONTH AT BUBBY’S
The owner of Bubby’s, Ron Silver, is also a painter in his spare time, and he has hung several portraits of Black leaders up at the restaurant for Black History Month — including Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and Ray Charles, among others. The paintings are also for sale, with all profits being donated to The Bubby’s Union Theological Seminary Scholarship Fund, an organization committed to advancing the work of social justice. You can also see the paintings at the Ron Silver Studios website.

LOWER MANHATTAN AS BLACK HISTORY
The Downtown Alliance blog is doing a series written by Black Gotham Experience’s Kamau Ware on downtown landmarks and their connection to Black history — and of course New York history. See the series here, starting with the history of the slave market at Pearl and Wall; the first Black rebellion on Maiden Lane; and the site of the New York Supreme Court case in 1789 that sought to find the conspirators behind a plot to usurp British authority and replace it with a working-class Irishman as king and an enslaved African as governor.