When Routt County artist Sandi Poltorak meets someone new, she may keenly observe the shape of their eyes and note their facial proportions.

Those are skills she learned years ago during comprehensive FBI composite sketch training at Quantico and that she honed during 12 years of forensic artist duties for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

Sitting at a drawing table this week in her shared art studio, she looked through facial sketches she created of accused or convicted perpetrators. She read past media releases that law enforcement agencies issued along with her composite pencil drawings to ask the public to help find accused criminals.

That emotionally draining work required hours of back-and-forth sketching and interviewing skills with victims and sometimes ended up with Poltorak crying too with the victims. In addition to her forensic lab duties, for 12 years she traveled around the state of Tennessee helping to create images of up to 600 wanted individuals. She also created facial reconstruction composites from human skulls and age-progression drawings of long-sought criminals.

Poltorak retired from forensics in 2011 after 29 years in the field, and now her years of detailed work help her create photo-realistic artwork of animals and people. Viewing the realism and life in the eyes of a buffalo or owl that Poltorak draws, viewers may think they are looking at a wildlife photograph.

“Sandi’s attention to detail, precise handling of her pencil and powers of observation lead to her outstanding photo-realism skills,” said Joanne Orce, a fellow artist at Pine Moon Fine Art Gallery in Steamboat Springs.

“Forensic artists need to be able to capture subtle proportions and features that make for a convincing resemblance of the subject,” Orce said. “Sandi brings those skills into our gallery in all forms of subject matter including rodeo clowns, animals, birds, houses and Native American people. To do what she does requires a level of patience, endurance and foresight that is aided by her forensic background.”

After earning a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry and criminology from Florida State University, Poltorak worked in the trace evidence section for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation forensics lab examining such evidence as gunshot residue, hair, fiber, paint, glass, fire debris, and shoe and tire tracks.

When the CSI Crime Scene Investigation television shows became popular, the lab team told the law enforcement officers to stop watching, Poltorak said. Even with advances in technology, the real forensics work is not as specific and speedy as depicted on television.

When the bureau sent out a request for an employee who would like to train to become a sketch artist, Poltorak volunteered based on her childhood affinity for drawing and natural talent, despite having no formal art training. So, she trained with the FBI and took basic drawing classes.

She said when victims moved past the initial trauma on to anger, they worked intensely with sketch artists. Recollecting is easier than remembering, Poltorak explained, so the victims start by identifying similar facial features from an FBI book of faces. The process starts with the artist drawing a head shape, then eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth and chin.

At the end of a drawing session, just like on television, Poltorak held up the sketch and said, “Is this the guy?” The responses from victims could be visceral.

“You always knew you drew a good one if they almost retched for their reaction when seeing the final product,” she said.

“Composite work is mentally draining as well, asking people to go back to their worst day,” said Poltorak, 65. “It’s pretty sad what people can do to each other. When I retired in 2011, I knew it was time to get on the happy side of life.”

Remembering happy times during skiing vacation visits, Poltorak was inspired to move to Steamboat in 2013. She steeled herself to approach a gallery before she let herself go skiing. With limited fine art experience, she approached the owners of former Circle 7 Fine Art Gallery, who invited her to present her work. That set her on her current artistic path.

Poltorak is an expert in graphite pencil techniques and smudging with blending stumps while using 15 different types of pencils. Her detailed work includes everything from private commissions to collaborative work on a mural for Sleeping Giant School.

“Her current works shows that extra dimension that she brings to her piece because of her honing in on details and listening to people describing things,” said collaborating artist Jennifer Baker.

Baker is highly complimentary of collaborator Poltorak as a talented, perceptive artist and authentic, selfless person.

“I have a huge amount of respect for the work that Sandi creates and the professionalism in which she works,” Baker said. “People come into your life, and they just make your heart smile. And she is one of them.”

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.”