Throughout the city’s history, women have shaped Milwaukee in ways seen and unseen.
This week, we'll hear from the Black women who shaped Milwaukee’s arts scene for a generation — many without the recognition locally that they’ve received nationally.
Tyanna Buie
Tyanna Buie is an award-winning visual artist and educator. She teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design and she’s one of thirty artists whose work was commissioned for the upcoming Obama Presidential Center, set to open in Chicago this Juneteenth.
"I always talk about my personal background because it is significant to the work that I create and have created," Buie says. "I grew up in the foster care system. I'm the youngest of four, and when I was in Milwaukee living with my aunt, I remember taking her computer paper when she went to work...and finding any ink pen around the house and then just watching this special on PBS where this guy was drawing a drawing every day, and I would just do what he did.
I will say the women, the Black women in Milwaukee that's been pushing and promoting the arts and also being artists, working with artists like myself, I felt so beyond welcomed. I came to Milwaukee after I got my master's. And it's like the moment I got there, I just started doing my thing and everybody just appreciated it. And that is very rare. I know it's rare, because I went to other cities and I didn't get that same energy. It took people a minute to even, like, want to look at what I was doing, let alone include me into things and talk about me in a positive [way]...But something about the Milwaukee people in general, and especially the Black artists, are very like, 'come on.' If it wasn't for that foundation in Milwaukee, I wouldn't be where I am today."
Sande Robinson
Sande Robinson is an art collector and advocate for Black art in Milwaukee. For the past 21 years she was president of the African American Art Alliance, which bought art for the Milwaukee Art Museum’s permanent collection.
"I work in Milwaukee's art scene kind of behind the scenes, but [it's] important in that I try to introduce unknown young artists to collectors and patrons in Milwaukee," Robinson says. "I think people should know that there are a number of Black women who are doing art here in Milwaukee, kind of hidden away, unknown to most of the people here. But the work is very, very, very good work and often well-respected and known kind of outside of Milwaukee more necessarily than inside of Milwaukee in the Milwaukee community...So I think it's important for those of us who have a little discretionary income to try to support some of the African-American women in the community who are out here working.
I'm on a board for the Bronzeville Center of the Arts... We're hoping to make a statement about African-American art in general, and in particular, maybe in the Great Lakes region. I have a nephew who is an associate curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem. We're hoping to have Bronzeville Center for the Arts have the same kind of stature that is now afforded the Studio Museum in Harlem...We would love for the Bronzeville Center to have a national reputation, but, you know, feature local."
Portia Cobb
Portia Cobb is a professor at UW-Milwaukee and an interdisciplinary artist, working as a filmmaker, video artist and performance artist. Her work has been featured, and awarded, globally.
"I think [my process], it always comes from a place of documentary, where I want to hold on to memory," says Cobb. "So my way of processing what I experience in my present and how it's informed by the past. So I'm always kind of considered a documentary artist, for that reason. I love to remember. And I love to reflect so that I can kind of mold myself in a way that honors the past.
I was hired to direct a project out of UW-Milwaukee's film department that was called the Community Media Project. I knew that my heart was in it because it was a way of bringing the tools of storytelling to those who didn't have spaces to tell their stories. So to put a camera in someone's hands or to do a writing workshop — I still have memories of how excited these kids would be and that they were creating a different narrative of the places that they lived. So I know that that was my mission. Now it's like I look and I see other things happening, like I see TRUE Skool. I see all these other modalities created for the creative voice — CR8TV House. It is daunting, but it's also kind of like I look at things like Black Lens and I go, well, maybe my work is done here."
Della Wells
Della Wells is a self-taught visual artist whose work depicts stories and worlds unto themselves. A 2026 Nohl Fellowship recipient, her work is featured internationally and nationally in museums, galleries and outsider art shows.
"I didn't start making art, and I think it's important to bring this up, seriously, until I was 42," says Wells. "But I always knew how to make art. One reason I'm bringing this up is because when I was 18 years old, there used to be a gallery here called Gallery Toward the Black Aesthetic, and I used to stare in the window where there was a portrait by a Chicago artist Betty Shabazz, and this was the first time that I ever was exposed to a Black artist. Prior to that it only occurred to me that white men made art. So this was really fascinating to me. And it was also doing the Black Arts Movement. This artist Teju said it well, that they made art by Black people, for Black people, and they didn't give a darn if white people liked it or not. And if they didn't like it, they said the artist did his job."
Evelyn Patricia Terry
Evelyn Patricia Terry is a full-time professional visual artist, and a 2026 Nohl Fellowship recipient, whose work has been featured across the nation in museums and galleries.
"I know when I first felt like I was an artist totally. I was in UWM, doing terribly in school, hated life and my mother told me to go to home economics because she wanted me to get a good job. She said you could get a job cooking somewhere in an institution, and I could get a job quicker if I had a degree in that," says Terry. "So eventually I saw this class called ‘Related Art’ in the Curriculum in Home Economics. So I take this class and I'm just having a little ball in there not knowing this is art. I just said, ‘Oh, this is fun.’ The teacher at the end of the semester said, ‘I think you're an artist.’ And I said, ‘What is that? I gotta get a degree. I can't sit around and do art. I have to get a degree.’ So she said, ‘You can get a degree in drawing.’ I said, ‘Where?!’
She said, ‘Over there in Mitchell Hall.’ So I go [to Mitchell Hall] and the first thing I see is a man pulling a print off of a printing press. And I was like, whoa, that's so great, whatever that is you're doing. So I said, ‘Could I have one?’ And I didn't even talk back then. He looked at me and said, ‘I don't know you.’ And I said, 'Oh, maybe you have to know people to get that, you know.' Then I went down the hall and I could see people doing pottery, painting and drawing. I felt like I had died and gone to heaven."
