It’s been thirteen years since Northeast Ohio lost one of its biggest and brightest art shows: Sankofa Fine Art Plus’ Black Art Expo, an annual showcase of Black art that ran from 2001 to 2011 and drew national acclaim. The festival is set to return in 2025—marking Sankofa’s 25th anniversary—to the Eastern Campus of Cuyahoga Community College. The timing couldn’t be better as three other regional art shows—the CAN Triennial, the FRONT Triennial, and the Robert Thurmer People’s Art Show at Cleveland State University—have recently made the announcement to call it quits, at least for now.

Sankofa Executive Director Robin Robinson is a Philadelphia native, Temple University graduate and certified art therapist. The mission of Sankofa Fine Art Plus is to develop and advocate for African American artists, and to present African American art as a credible and meaningful art form for neighborhood revitalization, through intergenerational community education and collaboration. At the time of its inception, Sankofa was one of the only Black arts nonprofit organizations in Cleveland.

“In 2023, we were awarded a sizable sustainability grant from The Gund Foundation. With that, Sankofa was able to hire the Janus Small Associates consulting firm to update our outdated Strategic Plan. Janus was also essential in helping form a strong working board of directors passionate about Sankofa, its mission and its position in the arts and culture community.”

Deidre McPherson serves as president of Sankofa’s re-established seven-member board. Her name is well known in the art world, as she is currently the chief community officer for the Assembly of the Arts and has held leadership roles at the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art (moCa) Cleveland.

The upcoming Expo will be a much more expansive undertaking than in past years.

“This will be a three-day ARTS Expo,” says Robinson. “There will be classes, music, spoken word and more. There will be a lot of diversity and excitement.”

So, what happened to the Black Art Expo? Economics played a large role in the festival’s cessation. While there have been other arts festivals to come on the scene in the past thirteen years, none of them match the economic impact of the Expo, nor do they have a comparable signature event. The Black Art Expo is truly a destination event.

“Sankofa’s Fine Art Expo was an enormous success. It was a sale and showcase of local Black professional artists, national Black artists and local emerging Black artists,” said Robinson. “However, the year-long prep work required proved overwhelmingly debilitating after ten years.”

“The Fine Art Expo was modeled after a very successful decade-long annual art festival in Philadelphia—the October Gallery, which is now reduced to an online shopping site,” says Gary Williams, former co-executive director of Sankofa.

“The founders of Sankofa Fine Art Plus felt they could do the same thing here in 1999. They attended a lot of art festivals back then, including at the October Gallery. People came from all up and down the Eastern seaboard. The Fine Art Expo in Cleveland was an enormous success from 2000 to 2011. The economic recession had an adverse effect on everyone with less disposable income to buy art.”

“Following the 2011 Fine Art Expo, Sankofa’s then-executive-director and board of directors worked tirelessly for two years to make a grand final artistic gesture by collaborating with Karamu House—the oldest African American theater in the country—and many funding institutions to commission Kent Twitchell, a nationally acclaimed muralist from California, to train local Black artists to install a 40-by-36-foot mural of actress/native Clevelander Ruby Dee on an outside wall of Karamu House, located in Cleveland’s Fairfax neighborhood. The mural was completed in June 2013.

Jerome White, a prominent artist in his own right, was one of the eight “apprentices” chosen to assist Twitchell on this project.

“Kent taught us his technique, and we were all assigned sections to paint; the process was very similar to that of a coloring book,” said White. “His design style is hyper-realistic, and the colors can fool the human eye when viewed from a certain distance. The further back you move from the piece, the more it comes into focus. Once everything is done, it takes on a decoupage aspect with the wall being pre-prepped before applying the art.”

“This monumental masterpiece was to be Sankofa’s swan song, and the plan was to liquidate the then-financially-depleted organization,” said Robinson.

Being familiar with the often-ravaging Cleveland winters, compounded by the unpredictable lake effect conditions of the region, Robinson and Williams urged Twitchell to seal the work to protect it from the harshness of the elements. Twitchell, a West Coast native, balked at the suggestion, feeling the work could withstand the harshest weather. Not so. Looking at the Ruby Dee mural today, the eleven-year-old work appears to be unsalvageable.

Attempts to obtain a comment from Karamu House regarding the future of the mural weren’t returned.
Instead of disbanding, the organization regrouped by downsizing the board and handing the reins over to the only board members who are artists (Williams, Robinson and Rickey Lewis) and the mural served as a way for Sankofa to pivot and expand its scope from gallery shows to public art by creating a series of Community Engagement murals throughout the Greater Cleveland area, with production teams that include apprentices who reside in the respective neighborhoods. The project’s title: Urban Renaissance with heART.

“The idea is to utilize the engagement of the community in the artistic mural-making process, while also listening and reflecting their messages on a large scale in their own spaces.”

“I believe art should be public,” Robinson continued. “The fact that the Cleveland Museum of Art is free is great! It provides an education. Black people in Cleveland need to know what their resources are. They need to know that these things are available. One of my missions is to educate Black boys and girls, Black men and women in the value of art.”

The impetus of the projects that followed was to address the alarming rise in youth violence in the city. Additional murals include:

Our Lives Matter (2015) – Located at the corner of East 105th and Yale Avenue, this mural created by Robinson and Gary Williams depicts a nuclear Black family with the father and young daughter sporting hoodies. The daughter is holding a sign that says “Our Lives Matter!”

Moreland Unity Mural (2016) – Created to help dissolve the disconnect felt by residents in the Moreland neighborhood from the rest of Shaker Heights, this mural is a series of multi-colored puzzle pieces on a 330-foot-long retaining wall, interspersed with images of the community’s residents.

Knowledge is Power (2017) – Located in the Glenville neighborhood, this mural features the likenesses of poet Dr. Maya Angelou, former President Barack Obama, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and rapper/actor Tupac Shakur. Input meetings were held with residents to decide on the theme.

Why Fit In When You Were Born to Stand Out?? (2018) – Installed in Franklin D. Roosevelt School in the Glenville neighborhood, this colorful piece was a collaboration between two local artists, members of the Glenville Boys and Girls Club and the Cleveland Police Department’s Black Shield Club.

VOTE (2020) – Located on the corner of East 91st and St. Clair Avenue, the mural depicts a young, dreadlocked girl with megaphone in hand, the word VOTE emblazoned across the side. She is wearing a T-shirt that says, “I’m Here to Change the World.”

Lady Justice (2021) – Located on the side of the East 79th Street branch of the Cleveland Public Library, this mural features a modern-day Lady Justice, and plays on the phrase “No Justice, No Peace.”

“The murals are part of my philosophy of public art. Of all the murals we’ve done, none of them have ever been defaced and with each one, someone takes it upon themselves to keep the surrounding area neat and tidy,” said Robinson.

Robinson believes it is crucial for residents of any community to have a hands-on level of involvement in creating said art.

“I think communities benefit from the Sankofa organization because they are involved in the messages that are being sent out about their community through artwork,” said Robinson. “It’s a therapeutic process getting to the point of creating the mural. So, it’s not a one-and-done. The community members go through the entire process, and it gives them a sense of pride and ownership of that mural. It’s more important to me that the community has a voice representative of them.”

There are no plans for new Sankofa Fine Art Plus murals in 2025 because of all the time and energy needed for planning the upcoming Expo.

A call for art and participants will most likely begin in late summer 2025. For more information, go to the Sankofa Black Art Expo website at blackartexpocle.com.