Music, Art, Community Take Center Stage at Freedom Fest Cleveland

On Saturday, Trump’s $100 million Grand Military Parade, comparable in heft to similar pomp in Russia and China, will get underway in and around the National Mall.
Saturday will also see Juneteenth celebrations nationwide, including in downtown Cleveland.

“Oh, it’s the irony of these two things happening at the same time,” Tony Sias, the head of the Karamu House, told Scene in a phone call. “I think there’s, should I say, diversity on June 14 in different ways.”

Sias, along with along with co-chair Heather Holmes Dillard, will be helping guide Cleveland’s fifth Freedom Fest, which kicked off in 2021 as a response to the George Floyd riots the year before.

Festivities will be from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Downtown’s Mall C on Saturday.

And Sias will, besides honoring the day slavery ended in the U.S.—June 19, 1865—have his own personal anniversary to be celebrating: the 110th year of Cleveland’s Karamu House, its oldest Black playhouse.

A celebration, Sias told Scene, with a kind of footnote. On Saturday, from a stage at Freedom Fest, Sias and crew will be announcing the theater’s Karamu Champion initiative, a perks system to benefit a new generation of recurring donors.

In other words, a way to keep Karamu going despite “being on hold” with usual NEA funds since May.

“As we see a refocus of arts and culture—we’ve always had to invest in ourselves,” he said. “And we do now more than ever.”

Most if not all of the revamping of the NEA stem from a series of executive orders signed by Trump in January and February, those that revolve philosophically around the idea that diversity, equity and inclusion is a threat to the U.S. Constitution.

Since then, the White House has scrapped anything DEI from the military, and cut funding to the Smithsonian Museum that has anything to do with “ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives.” (Orders a federal judge in California blocked partially last week.) Arts grants have been rescinded and direction has been changed.

“I hear ‘defund,’ I hear ‘freedom’, I hear ‘DEI,’” artist Donald Black, Jr., said. “To me, all of it is bullshit.”

“I’m part of the excluded communities,” he added. “Whether they have the funds, or they don’t have the funds, I represent the demographic that don’t experience them anyway.”

Black, Jr., is a part of a cohort of 10 artists featured in Stories Of Us, a completely privately-funded public art series making its Cleveland debut at Saturday’s festival. Each artist was given a seven-foot-tall cylinder to either paint or wrap with imagery around a common theme—freedom, self-expression, statement of truth.

All patriotic values in the mind of Ashley Shaw Scott Adjaye, the co-founder of the series and chief curator. Values that precede Trump 2.0, she said. Values that are everlasting in a country that swore to protect them.

“I mean, we began all of this two years before we knew what administration would be here,” she told Scene near the installation on Mall C. “So this is not in response to anyone or anything besides the document that was written in 1776.”

“We are just looking at the words that were written,” Adjaye added.

Leigh Brooklyn, a local artist who painted a portrayal of Sojourner Truth, framed the exhibit, which has been shown in New York and Atlanta, as a salve when some art galleries are more hesitant to host progressive art—fearing they’ll lose state or federal dollars.

“I just think there comes a point when you just have to say screw it: I’m making this either way, because these stories need to be told,” she said.

“That’s why it’s important to have organizations like these,” she said, eyeing the row of painted cylinders. “Those saying, ‘Well, we’re just going to show it either way.”

This article appears in Cleveland SCENE 06/05/25 Best of Cleveland.