The Center for Black Excellence and Culture, the much-anticipated, $36 million “cultural home” for Black Madison, isn’t slated to open for another two years.

But eager art enthusiasts need only to wait until Saturday.

That’s when the center will hold its first visual arts event, a Black Art Expo at Fountain of Life Covenant Church, 633 W. Badger Road, which is next door to the future site of the center and led by its founder and CEO, Rev. Alex Gee. 

The free, all-ages event runs from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m., featuring an all-Black lineup of speakers and exhibitors. It’s a preview of the sort of programs the Center will host when it opens in late 2025 as a hub for visual and performing arts, co-working and community gatherings.

“What we’re trying to do is … whet the appetite, to already start making connections between artists, and between artists and the community before the groundbreaking,” said Annik Dupaty, the Center’s visual arts programming coordinator. 

A new kind of art market

Twenty Black creators from southern Wisconsin, working in pastels, pencil, paint, pottery and more, will display their work at tables in the atrium. They’ll talk to visitors and sell their work, including originals, prints and art-imprinted merchandise. Among them are Madison-area artists Desere Mayo, Amira Caire and Stephanie Prewitt.

“There will be just a little bit of everything,” Dupaty said, explaining that she and her team invited participants by sending postcards and emails to the registry of Black artists they’ve been building. The call drew artists from seven different decades, from teens to septuagenarians. 

Madison native Brooklyn Doby, 26, is one of the younger participants. A self-described “entrepreneur, painter and activist through paint,” Doby will fill her booth with paintings, clothing, and magnets featuring her signature “abstract portraits of Black beauty.” 

“I think it’s very important to have a space for Black artists to collaborate and to showcase our work,” Doby said. “Yes, there’s art all around Madison, but … oftentimes when I have my art shows, I’m the only person that looks like me, and I have an only booth … that has visuals of Black people. So I think it’s extremely important to be part of the event where that’s all you see.”

Speakers reveal their artistic origins

Yet more Black artists will take their turns at the microphone Saturday, giving talks on art history, their next plans and, especially how they got started in the art world. The day’s theme is “Beginnings,” a nod to the nascent center. 

Madison potter Sharon Bjyrd will demonstrate how to use a pottery wheel. Comfort Wasikhongo and Silvan Fleming Jr. will demonstrate painting techniques. Former Madison poet laureate Fabu Phillis Carter will read selections of her work, while DJ Steel and genre-blending band Frisson bring the music. 

Closing out the event, Madison native and Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design associate professor Brad Anthony Brown will take the stage alongside Milwaukee artists Evelyn Patricia Terry and Della Wells for a 4 p.m. panel discussion on their trajectories as artists. 

For Terry, 77, the journey started as a failed home economics student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in the 1960s. She was begrudgingly studying what her mother had told her to, until one instructor saw her work and encouraged her to major in art instead. 

At the time, Terry had never been to a museum. Even when, a few years later, she began taking art classes, she didn’t know a single Black artist until she found a book about them in the library.

“My first heroes were Picasso and Andy Warhol, because I hadn’t seen any other Black people doing anything with art. In class, we weren’t taught about Black people doing art,” said Terry, who’s made her living through her printmaking, pastels, collages and more since 1985. 

“I thought I was the first Black artist, that I was gonna have to be very good at this so I can set a good example.”

That, she said, shows why a place like the Center for Black Excellence and Culture will be so important. “It would be something encouraging for young African American artists, from children, to have a place to go where (art) is part of their culture and their environment as a normal thing,” Terry said.

Children have been on Dupaty’s mind too, as she plans Saturday’s event and other events to come. Throughout the expo, they’re invited to make their own art and participate in artist-led activities. 

“Think about little ones coming in … and thinking, ‘I could be an artist … I’m seeing other Black people like myself doing these amazing things, and that becomes possible for me,’” Dupaty said. 

‘Collective excitement’ in the air

In a 2021 interview, Gee told the Cap Times that Black Madisonians currently have to go to Milwaukee or Chicago to find a place “to exhale,” and businesses are “languishing” as they struggle to attract and retain Black employees.

“We have not built or created a space where Black people can dream, nurture, innovate, network, perform and create in a way that helps to revive us on a deep, deep level,” Gee said. “There’s an innate sense of excellence and greatness about us, but we don’t have space to cultivate it.”

The Center for Black Excellence aims to be that place. Though it won’t break ground until spring 2024, the center has already begun its performing arts programming. In July, it teamed up with the Children’s Theater of Madison to host “The Wiz Experience,” which included three performing arts workshops for Black youth led by Dana Pellebon, the center’s director of theatrical programming.

Dupaty hopes locals of all ages and backgrounds will come out on Saturday to celebrate and support Black artists — and leave inspired. She dreams the event might draw thousands. 

“People put signs in their yards and posts on social media about how they support Black people and Black artists, but this is one of those opportunities to come out and really actually show up for Black artists,” Dupaty said. 

She also sees it as a chance to be part of the “collective excitement” about the center, which is currently working to raise the last $3 million it would need to be “debt-free” by the time it breaks ground.

“Right now, yes, we’re in a borrowed space, but I think people will start to dream about what’s going to be happening on that very same block.”