Three years after Brooklyn Public Library turned its Central Library façade into a giant canvas for Jay-Z’s lyrics, the iconic New York institution is now turning its cultural spotlight on Trinidad and Tobago’s King of Soca.
The Journey of a Soca King: The Exhibition opens at Central Library on August 22, celebrating more than four decades of Machel Montano’s music, career and influence on Caribbean culture.
In 2023, Jay-Z’s lyrics were projected across the exterior of the same library as part of The Book of HOV, a major exhibition celebrating the Brooklyn-born hip-hop icon’s life and career. Now, the story shifts from hip-hop to soca, but with another artist whose journey is deeply connected to Brooklyn.
“Brooklyn helped raise me. I lived here, I learned here, and some of my earliest audiences were right in these neighborhoods,” Montano said.
His Brooklyn connection began when he was just nine years old. In 1984, he spent time in the borough after receiving a scholarship to Marie Brooks’ summer programming, participating in workshops that helped shape his development. Montano later performed at Madison Square Garden alongside calypso legends including the Mighty Sparrow, the Mighty Shadow and Lord Kitchener. By the mid-1990s, he was staying on Utica Avenue and recorded “Big Truck” in Brooklyn. The Journey of a Soca King (JSK) exhibition will feature costumes, trophies, vinyl records and other artefacts from Montano’s career, while visitors can listen to his music at the Library’s vinyl listening station and explore pivotal moments from his life and career. The exhibition also reflects Brooklyn’s enormous Caribbean presence and the influence of Caribbean communities on the borough’s cultural identity. For Montano, the significance goes beyond celebrating his own career.
“What moves me most is thinking about a young person walking in, seeing the costumes and the trophies and the records, and understanding that this came from a small island and reached the world,” he said.
The JSK exhibition runs August 22 to September 12, 2026, with programming also extending to BPL branches in Caribbean communities across Brooklyn. On September 3, Like Ah Boss: Journey of a Soca King, the 2026 documentary about Montano, will be projected onto the façade of Central Library: creating an extraordinary full-circle moment at the same landmark where Jay-Z’s story was celebrated just three years ago. Montano’s personal archive, from which the exhibition draws, was inscribed in 2024 on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register for Latin America and the Caribbean. From Jay-Z to Machel Montano, Brooklyn Public Library is once again using music to tell a bigger story about culture, identity, migration and the global influence of communities that began far beyond Brooklyn. And this time, the sound of Soca Music is taking centre stage.
