"Slow Fade to Black," at Celebrate Brooklyn! in Prospect Park Geri Allen, seated, and Carrie Mae Weems working on their show "Slow Fade to Black." POINTING her camera, the artist Carrie Mae Weems lobbed directions. "A little more smoke!" and "Women, raise your mirrors!" she instructed the performers gathered recently in a black-box theater on the Lower East Side. Geri Allen, the jazz pianist and composer, sat nearby, scribbling notes. Ms. Weems, known for photography and film projects that plumb issues of race and gender, was filming the Persuasions, four men tricked out in purple suits, in a flirtatious encounter with three female singers in regal black turbans. "Trust me, love me, feel me," the men crooned. "Can I trust you?" the women cooed back. "What happened to "No, no, no"?" Ms. Weems asked. "It sounds great," Ms. Allen shouted from the sidelines. Just do more! Ms. Allen and Ms. Weems were creating images for a multimedia show called "Slow Fade to Black," set to have its premiere on Friday at Celebrate Brooklyn!, the Prospect Park summer festival of performing arts and film. Marrying Ms. Weems's images (on three giant screens) to original music by Ms. Allen, the show is among the festival's 32 mostly free events, which began last week with the reggae star Jimmy Cliff and will end in August with the country singer Lyle Lovett. "Slow Fade" is an unusual first-time festival collaboration for two African-American artists who tend to inhabit separate citadels of culture: museums and galleries for Ms. Weems, and concert halls and clubs for Ms. Allen. For this project the two will be joined by the Grammy-winning members of Ms. Allen's trio, Esperanza Spalding, a bassist and singer, and the drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. Also part of the show are, among others, the tap dancer Maurice Chestnut; the singers Lizz Wright and Patrice Rushen; and Afro Blue, Howard University's vocal jazz ensemble. If the title "Slow Fade to Black" sounds familiar, it's because it is the culmination of a project that began in 2010 and continued in 2011: a series of blurred, soft-focus photographs of famous black female performers like Eartha Kitt, Nina Simone and Marian Anderson. The title works in two ways, Ms. Weems said. The blurry photographs are a comment on the women's receding from cultural prominence and the idea of a fade "to black" suggests a new generation of emerging black female artists. Many of the "Slow Fade" photographs will be projected while Ms. Wright sings on Friday. Ms. Allen composed a song to accompany the images. "I first and foremost view this as an evening of music, centered on this idea of a woman's journey, the span of a life," Ms. Weems said recently as she and Ms. Allen dined in an Italian restaurant in the West Village. "The journey is from your first feeling of emotion and love, the birth of your children, growing old," she said. She and Ms. Allen are both in their 50s. They have known each other more than a decade and have worked together before. Ms. Weems, tall and ebullient with a dash of curly hair, is perhaps best known for her 1990 project "Kitchen Table Series." It deployed text and images to show a woman (Ms. Weems herself) sitting at the same kitchen table at various points in her emotional life. More recently, her 2009 video project "Afro-chic" explored 1960s pop culture, concentrating on younger women. Ms. Weems's 1995-96 project "From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried," part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art, is a layered work consisting of about 30 representations of African-Americans in the history of American photography. They are accompanied by text that explores the history from Ms. Weems's perspective, creating a counternarrative to the way the images were often intended. In the Celebrate Brooklyn! project, "the images will inform the performance," said Ms. Allen, a soulful, post-bop pianist whom Ben Ratliff of The New York Times recently called "one of the more important jazz musicians of the last 25 years" and whose album "Flying Toward the Sound" made several "best of" lists for 2010. She is shorter and quieter than Ms. Weems, her face framed by locks. While the overall structure of the show has been mostly sketched out, there will be plenty of improvisation as things get cooking, the women said. Sometimes the three screens will form a triptych or linger on Ms. Allen's hands on the keyboard. Look for Ms. Allen and Ms. Rushen to perform a version of "Que Sera Sera" and for Ms. Allen's contemporary arrangement of the spiritual "Oh, Freedom," to be sung by Afro Blue. Images on the three screens will shift between video projections and the live action onstage. The staged images of men and women that Ms. Weems created at the Lower East Side theater will be there too. They are intended as explorations of the nature of love, desire and female identity, examining women's relationships to men, children and, most important, to themselves, she said. For example, the images show women looking at themselves and one another in mirrors or approaching a man who looks away. "Slow Fade to Black" is Friday night at 8 at the Prospect Park Bandshell, Prospect Park West and Ninth Street, Park Slope, Brooklyn; $3 suggested donation; (718) 683-5600, bricartsmedia.org.