FRIDAYS WITH RAGGA NYC

RAGGA NYC is proud to partner with Ace Hotel Brooklyn for a summer residency that is the blooming of a beautiful partnership!

For this residency RAGGA NYC has tapped some RAGGA NYC family members and cousins of the RAGGA NYC community to bring some vibes to The Lobby at Ace Hotel Brooklyn — every Friday in July to September!

Come have a cocktail, catch up with the boos and sweat it out. We are also excited to expand and bring in a lot of young djs that we have had our eyes on for some time!

This Friday, they invite Viva Ruiz for a special set. 

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Viva Ruiz shethey is the Latinx progeny of Ecuadorian immigrants and a community and sex work educated advocate and multi hyphenate artist from Jamaica Queens, New York. Ruiz is building power and birthing pro-abortion propaganda with the Thank God for Abortion (TGFA) initiative whose mission sits at the intersection of abortion access, queerness and spirituality. S/he stands on the shoulders of many, eager to celebrate and be in service to the spirits that love and walk with them./ Savant Laurent is a SF born NYC based artist & entrepreneur. Her roots stem from gospel music into theatre & dance into modeling into DJing. Savant sang at the 2009 presidential inauguration Savant, and she has done modeling campaigns for Nike. She has even performed at SF war memorial opera house in La Boheme & Madame butterfly. Savant is a dreamer who can accomplish anything she sets her mind to. Her ambition and her dream like mindset can be felt in her DJ sets. She has been described as a “Big room” DJ & likes to take listeners on a journey with her through playing songs that stick to a theme that immulate different scenarios we find ourselves in in life. She is one to watch as there is no saying where she will go next.

RAGGA NYC is a hybrid of ideas that began as late night conversations over familial island roots, current social politics, empanadas vs. beef patties, pum pum shorts, scamming and a longing for a party that provides for queer Caribbeans and their kin. A non profit platform/ project and art collective founded by Christopher Udemezue (@NeonChristina), RAGGA NYC connects a growing network of queer Caribbean artists and allies working across a wide range of disciplines—including visual art, fashion, poetry and more—to explore how race, sexuality, gender, heritage, and history inform their work and their lives. RAGGA NYC has shown at a variety of galleries and museums, including the New Museum, PS1 MoMa, and Mercer Union (Toronto). In June 2017 RAGGA NYC completed a residency with the New Museum “All The Threatened and Delicious Things Joining One Another” that has continued to foster an extended family that makes space for solidarity, celebration, and expression, with deep commitments to education and grassroots organizing.

Defining the Sound of RAGGA NYC: The sound of Ragga can be defined as the pairing of music from the greater Caribbean with electronic music originating in Detroit, being remixed across the African diaspora, and returning to the queer night clubs of New York City. At the nexus of these genres and various sub-genres is a shared lineage/universal narrative that, by allowing the marriage of, RAGGA expands the notion of what scenes can be in community with one another. RAGGA is the setting where queer folks can openly enjoy dancehall and reggae, where Black people can rejoice and re-stake claim to electronic music, and where the embrace of countercultures further inspires innovative sounds that reflect the multitude of identities in which they stem from. At no point does the sound reflect a basic exchange or one-to-one trade off of dancehall to techno, soca to club, kompa to house, etc. When properly conducted/curated, the sound of RAGGA echoes an arrangement of acknowledgements of the identitie