Mural by: McClellan Douglas
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Message from Director Nikky Finney: 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.
