The Bright New Year Coming to Black Cultural Arts in South Carolina
Dear Good People,
It’s been a long time, but I have a sweet story to share as the tough year winds down. In 2022, in Columbia, South Carolina an amazing woman, Frances Close, purchased an old 1940’s airplane hangar building, a former electric and lighting business. These true symbols matter to this true story in a mighty way. The building sits in a part of Columbia, just off downtown, that 75 years ago was a bustling Black community. It is now the Robert Mills district. The historically Black colleges that are near the building today were once surrounded by theatres, doctors’ offices, barber and beauty shops, restaurants, and grocery stores. Frances Close purchased the building and asked me if I would consider directing what she thought might become the new Ernest A. Finney, Jr Cultural Arts Center, named for my father and one of her South Carolina heroes. I’ll tell you more about this when I see you but the spirit of one of my sheroes, Margaret Burroughs, of Chicago, Illinois, descended immediately into the room where that question was awkwardly dangling. Burroughs was a Black woman visual artist who kept making her art even while building a viable and incredible Black Arts institution for the community that hungrily needed one. We often need models for the things that have never been up-close done before. Burroughs was mine. The University of South Carolina supported my decision to step away from the academic classroom for a while and I agreed to direct the new cultural arts center named for my father, the man who used to come home from a long day of fighting the good fight against injustice by carefully settling the diamond tip of the long-playing needle down into the tenor saxophone of Coleman Hawkins’ Night Hawk.
For the past year we have been meeting and discussing how to transform the airplane hangar-electric-lighting building into a cultural arts center intent on excavating and nurturing the cultural wealth of the Black community, long neglected and long ignored here in South Carolina, a community that has been here for hundreds of years influencing national and world culture without invitation or permission. We have been busy doing the first level of quotidian things, those first things that you always do before you invite family over, remove the fifty-year-old carpet, wash windows, secure proper tables and chairs for all who will want to come and peek and see.
On January 14, 2023, you are invited to join us at the Ernest A. Finney, Jr. Cultural Arts Center, 1510 Laurens Street, Columbia, S.C., from noon until dusk. 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm. We are hosting our first (hopefully, of many) Pop-up Artists’ Market in the unfinished hangar portion of the building. We have invited small businesses and artists to set up their tables and introduce themselves to the community in order that we all might see what they are creating and working on. We are inviting the community to come see who we are and walk through and browse our new-unfinished building spaces. At 2:00 pm Dinah Johnson, the nationally celebrated Children’s book author will read from her newest collection, H is for Harlem. Conversation will happen. Free books will be given away. Art will be celebrated.
We are about to begin a new chapter in the book of the Black Cultural Arts of South Carolina. We feel deeply guided by the light and radiance of the folks who came before us, whose presence and creative spirits is the human electricity that still guides our feet and hands and hearts.
Soon on this FB page we will post the flyer for the event. We will be posting other announcements here until our own page is ready to light up the sky. Are you excited? Say yes!
Nikky Finney
Poet (forever) (and now)
Director of the Ernest A. Finney, Jr Cultural Arts Center