15 Years of Storytelling, 26 Years of Power in Community: Sankofa Revives the Black Art Expo

Jerome White, featured artist in the 2026 revival of Sankofa’s Black Art Expo September 18–20, remembers his own introduction to the Black Art Expo scene in late 1990s Baltimore:

“I met Larry Poncho Brown, and he became a mentor to me,” remembers White. “I was trying to fit in as an artist at that time, to be accepted.” The two met at the Baltimore Expo and Brown modelled an openness and ease in his role as artist; “Brown said, ‘you’re part of the crew now.’” The Expos emerging in urban hubs across the country gave White and his creative peers places to show their work—White is a painter, who also makes murals—on their own terms, among a national network of Black artist-makers.

The Expos also gave White an arena to grow as a leader himself. “In watching [artists such as] Charles Bibbs [Riverside, California] and Tom McKinney of Philly, I learned how to be a reliable person,” explains White. “It’s about being there for other artists, especially the emerging ones, being reliable… helping and mentoring.” For White, who is no stranger to these values in his day job as an art teacher at Cleveland Heights-University Heights City Schools for more than thirty years, “being the featured artist at the revived Cleveland Black Art Expo is an honor; I’ve come full circle.”

White experienced the Philadelphia and Atlanta Black Art Expos before bringing it home to Cleveland, where it began in 2000 at Cuyahoga Community College East (Tri-C East) and was held annually until 2011, when the climate for art shows and festivals shifted with a depressed economy.

Sankofa Fine Art Plus, now in its 27th year as a nonprofit, was going to make that Expo its swansong event. Robin Robinson, executive director since 2015 when she ran the organization collaboratively with Gary Williams, who retired in 2020, led the shift from Expo to public art, or “community facing” projects.

“In 2013,” she explains, “we decided to work with artists to create public art, to put our energies into murals that our entire community could engage with.” To date, Sankofa has produced or supported over two dozen murals across Cleveland neighborhoods, including Mount Pleasant, Glenville, Buckeye, and Ohio City.

“For the last few years we’ve been exploring an Expo revival,” says Robinson. “The 15th Greater Cleveland Urban Film Festival (CUFF) at Shaker Square Theater felt like the right opportunity to create an interdisciplinary experience for a new generation of Cleveland culture-seekers.”

That CUFF and the Black Art Expo will happen simultaneously is a boon to Shaker Square, as well, which has seen a significant downturn in pedestrian traffic and new business development in recent years. The Square’s adjacency to public transportation links people living in the very communities that are home to Sankofa Fine Art Plus’s mural projects to the Expo, as the larger-scale Expos of the past were held at Tri-C East in the far-east suburb of Highland Hills. “The site will deepen our engagement with the communities we work with and in, increase attendance for the Expo and the CUFF, and foster an ethos of art, culture, and community at Shaker Square,” says Robinson.

When asked what’s different about Expos of today, White notes the influence of the internet and social media—which makes most people more confident as creative content makers, more apt to identify as “artists”—before returning to his earlier point about inclusion, belonging to a community of artists, not “standing on the sidelines of the [art world] trying to figure out how to fit in.”

While Robinson and her team are still selecting artists for this year’s Expo, it will feature the work of six Cleveland-based artists of the African diaspora, as well as a variety of vendors. Additional programming will include community discussion on art collecting, and artist talks about common themes and interdisciplinary visuals in CUFF films. For further information, visit sankofafineart.org.

The Sankofa Fine Art Plus Black Art Expo
September 18–20
Kamron Photography Studio Gallery, 13200 Shaker Square, Cleveland