Fast forward and I end up in Harlem home for many of black America, very much the psychic heart of the black experience, really the place where the Harlem Renaissance existed.

The Bells of St. Martin's Fall Silent as Churches in Harlem Struggle

I grew up in New York City, between Harlem and the Bronx.

I work with kids a lot. These are kids I work with in Harlem.

This is Harlem, actually, on January 20th, thinking about itself in a very wonderful way.

Or, as Father Divine in Harlem used to say to folks, Some people preach the Gospel.

The most exciting is the Harlem Children's Zone, which over 10 years, led by Geoffrey Canada, has, through a mixture of schooling and family and community projects, attempted to transform not just education in schools, but the entire culture and aspiration of about 10,000 families in Harlem.

Harlem now, sort of explaining and thinking of itself in this part of the century, looking both backwards and forwards ...

Both churches were built by white congregations before Harlem became a black metropolis Metropolitan Community in 1870, St. Martin's a decade later.

So I work now at The Studio Museum in Harlem, thinking about exhibitions there, thinking about what it means to discover art's possibility.

At my organizations, we have provided free and low cost gymnastics, based in Harlem, for over 15,000 urban youth (primarily black and Hispanic) and have trained national and international champions.

I always say Harlem is an interesting community because, unlike many other places, it thinks of itself in the past, present and the future simultaneously no one speaks of it just in the now.

St. Martin's was taken over by a black congregation under the Rev. John Howard Johnson, who led a boycott of retailers on 125th Street, a main street for shopping in Harlem, who resisted hiring or promoting blacks.

The poor, however, do. Whereas psephological studies in the United States have demonstrated that the poor do not vote in significant numbers (presidential election turnout in Harlem averaged 23 before Barack Obama s two candidacies), the opposite is true in India.

Former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, the remarkable director general of the WHO at the time, strongly supported this recommendation. At the international AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa, in July 2000, I described why a new global fund was needed to fight AIDS.

Precisely because he is a grandee, he is in the position to draw national attention to a serious issue. If the same thing had happened to an unknown man in Harlem, or some other poor, or predominantly black district, no one would ever have heard about it.

Thelma Golden, curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, talks through three recent shows that explore how art examines and redefines culture. The post black artists she works with are using their art to provoke a new dialogue about race and culture and about the meaning of art itself.

So the last iteration of this project has been called Flow, with the idea now of creating a real network of artists around the world really looking, not so much from Harlem and out, but looking across, and Flow looked at artists all born on the continent of Africa.