Leilani Lewis

by Leilani Lewis In 2002, Leatrice Ellzy was handed a folder with her first major assignment for the National Black Arts Festival: produce a tribute to the Negro Ensemble Company. She'd never heard of it. "Mind blown," she says of the research that followed. "A Sam Jackson, a Denzel Washington, Phylicia Rashad. All these people that I grew up watching. They were all in this NEC."  The Negro Ensemble Company had launched careers and shaped Black theater since 1967. Ellzy spent months tracking...

The first major European exhibition of Black American modernist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) recently opened at Kunsthal KAdé in the Netherlands. 70 original paintings, 25 drawings, and 75 prints trace Lawrence's six-decade career in Jacob Lawrence | African American Modernist. It's a historic moment that opens new doors for understanding the full story of American art.

Wa Na Wari operates from an understanding of itself as one node in a larger Black arts ecosystem. "We serve one segment of the public, and this includes traditional gallery artists and installation artists," Johnson explains.