CultureCon opened Saturday at the Brooklyn Navy Yard with a proposition that sounds less like a conference theme than a challenge to the usual way culture gets canonized: the museum does not come later. The people making the work are already the collection.
Attendees at CultureCon. Photo: CultureCon Collective.
This year’s gathering, called Museum of Us, is expected to bring about 12,000 creative entrepreneurs, creators and cultural leaders to the Duggal Greenhouse for two days of talks, workshops, career-building and the kind of highly organized serendipity that large conferences now promise. CultureCon runs through Sunday, with a lineup that includes John Legend, Mahershala Ali, Colin Kaepernick, Niecy Nash-Betts, Daniel Kaluuya, Sherri Shepherd, Olandria Carthen and Miles Caton.
The celebrity names are useful shorthand for the scale of the event, but the more interesting change this year is lower to the ground. CultureCon has been adding places where attendees can actually do something with all that inspiration: a Career Lounge with recruiters, a Creative Business Stage, speed networking, a Small Business Market and a new Braindate program meant to match people for more deliberate conversations.
Imani Ellis, CultureCon’s founder and chief executive, has been unusually direct about the reason for that shift. “Inspiration can’t be where it stops,” she told People when the 2026 lineup was announced. The question, she said, is what happens after people leave: whether they meet someone who changes the direction of a career, learn how to negotiate a deal or simply walk into a room they assumed was not meant for them.
That gives Museum of Us a more interesting premise than a weekend of panels with famous people. A museum usually confers importance retrospectively. Someone decides what deserves a wall, a label and a place in the permanent collection. CultureCon is trying to reverse that sequence and celebrate the people shaping culture while they are still in the middle of shaping it.
There is an obvious tension in the idea, and it may be part of what makes the festival work. An event arguing that culture is not only shaped by the biggest name onstage has assembled some very big names for its stages. Legend, Ali, Kaepernick and Kaluuya are precisely the sort of people institutions already know how to frame. But the weekend also makes room for artists, authors, founders and small-business owners whose careers are still being built.
For the first time, CultureCon is working with Black Girl Art Show and Black Boy Art Show to spotlight emerging Black artists, while Literature and Libations is bringing books and author meet-and-greets into the festival. The organization’s 2026 Creative Class goes even wider, naming 83 people across six categories, from fashion and beauty to technology and social good. Filmmaker Ryan Coogler is this year’s Creative of the Year.
The effect is to make the museum metaphor increasingly literal. There are people to look at, certainly, but also things to buy, careers to study, work to discover and rooms designed around encounter. The Career Lounge promises access to recruiters from companies including HBO Max and Nike. The Small Business Market is devoted to Black-owned brands. The Creative Playground is less solemn than anything that usually gets called a museum, with hands-on stations built for experimentation rather than contemplation.
CultureCon began eight years ago as a room Ellis wished existed. It has since become large enough to fill one of Brooklyn’s more imposing event spaces and attract major corporate partners. The risk for any gathering built around community is that scale eventually overwhelms intimacy. CultureCon’s answer this year appears to be not to get smaller, but to subdivide the crowd into more useful rooms.
That may be the most New York thing about the festival. The city is full of cultural institutions that tell us what mattered. CultureCon is more interested in the messier question of what matters before anyone has finished deciding.
Ellis has described Museum of Us as a way to give people their flowers while they can still smell them. The phrase can sound ceremonial, but the machinery surrounding it is practical: introductions, hiring, mentorship, commerce, visibility. Recognition is useful. Access is better.
For one more day in Brooklyn, CultureCon is trying to offer both. The people in the room are the audience, the exhibitors and, if the theme is to be believed, the collection itself.
CultureCon continues Sunday, Oct. 4, from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. at the Duggal Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The event is for ages 18 and older. Details and ticket availability are at CultureCon Collective.
