Kojo Kamau’s ACE Gallery Gave Black Columbus Artists a Place to Thrive
People gave Richard Duarte Brown all sorts of reasons he couldn’t be an artist. “Everything has been done before,” they said. “You have to live in New York if you want to be an artist,” they told him. “And besides, you’re too shy.”
“I wasn’t shy,” says Brown, who goes by Duarte. “I stopped talking because you’re telling me I can’t be who I know I am.”
Brown came to Ohio to live with his brother at age 13, determined to be an artist. In his teenage years, he would visit the Columbus barbershop of wood carver Elijah Pierce, who would later become an internationally known folk artist. But it wasn’t until Brown was married with kids that he found a place he could truly call his artistic home: ACE Gallery.
In the late 1980s, Brown worked as a screen printer at night and promoted his art to galleries during the day, eventually connecting with beloved folk artist Smoky Brown, who took Duarte under his wing and brought him to ACE—Art for Community Expression—a nonprofit gallery founded by photographer Kojo Kamau and his wife, Mary Ann Williams, that launched Downtown in 1979 and moved to the Short North in 1986. Smoky and Kamau sensed Duarte’s insatiable hunger to make art, and rather than encouraging him to get a degree and come back in a few years, they validated him and helped him find his way as an artist. “Kojo and all those guys just took me in,” Duarte says. “ACE made you feel like family.”
Over the years, ACE helped Duarte develop his unique artistic voice; recently, the Greater Columbus Arts Council and the Columbus Museum of Art selected him for the 2022 Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Fellowship. And Brown is not an outlier. Many of the city’s best-known Black artists—legendary figures such as Robinson, Pierce, Smoky Brown, Queen Brooks and others—got their start at ACE during a time when most exhibition spaces didn’t show Black art.
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ACE was an anomaly: a Black-owned gallery and community gathering place for artists who had been shut out of galleries and museums. “To create good, meaningful, impactful art, artists need to be free. To be free, they need to be able to create and present in places that allow them to be themselves,” says Scott Woods, a cultural critic, poet, Columbus Alive columnist and the owner of Streetlight Guild, an East Side art space that local artists point to as carrying on the legacy of ACE. “It is vital that Black artists have places where they can not only show their work, but create work and sell work.”
ACE closed its doors about 20 years ago, and its founding couple is no longer living. But the lasting mark it left on the local arts scene is still front of mind for some of the city’s longtime arts advocates, who speak in hushed tones of the gallery’s accomplishments and the welcoming, inspiring community it fostered, none of which would have been possible without the humble leadership of a quiet kid from Bronzeville.
Born Robert Jones Jr. in Columbus in 1939, Kojo Kamau grew up on the East Side, not far from the Main Library, where he would look through issues of National Geographic and envy the continent-hopping photographers in its pages. Often, on his way to the library, Kamau would walk through the Columbus Museum of Art, initially because the building had a water fountain. Staring at the artwork as he strolled by, Kamau never dreamed he’d one day see his own photos on the museum walls.
A schoolmate of Aminah Robinson, Kamau took his first photography class at East High School and graduated in 1957, then enrolled in the Columbus College of Art & Design for a time while working odd jobs, such as washing test tubes at a children’s hospital lab. He talked his way into a job taking photos for the Columbus Black newspaper The Ohio Sentinel before joining the U.S. Air Force in 1960 and editing the base newspaper in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. There, he faced traumatic discrimination.
“Things didn’t add up. I’m joining the Air Force to defend a country that won’t even let me go across the street and get in the ocean. I can get a gun and go to Vietnam, but I can’t go across the street,” Kamau said in a 2015 conversation with longtime Columbus arts advocate Bettye Stull, which was documented by local arts patron Roy Gottlieb. “I didn’t have any pictures of down South because I didn’t want to remember those four years.”
Before coming home to Columbus in 1964, Kamau married, then later divorced in 1970, the same year he traded his birth name for an African moniker: Kojo, meaning “unconquerable,” and Kamau, “quiet one,” in Yoruba. Throughout the ’70s, Kamau became more serious about photography and his mission to document Black life. He also got a job working as a medical photographer at Ohio State, where he met his second wife, Mary Ann Williams, a poet, actress and professor of theater and communication in the Black studies department who hosted a WOSU TV show, Afromation.
Kamau would take the publicity photos for Afromation guests, including Black celebrities such as Muhammad Ali and Alex Haley. Other photos of prominent figures required more ingenuity and hustle, like the time Kamau went to the Downtown Lazarus department store on his OSU lunch break to photograph Ray Charles, who was selling shirts for Pepsi. But Kamau also turned his lens on local life, shooting a now-famous series of portraits of Elijah Pierce in his barbershop.
In 1978, Kamau opened Kojo Photo Art Studio at 90 N. Washington Ave., around the corner from Pierce. That summer, he and Williams made their first trip to Africa, traveling to Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Egypt, and returning home with a whole new understanding of art, culture and history. “On the way back from Africa, I said to Mary Ann, ‘You know, any artist who wants to go to Africa should be able to go to Africa.’ And I said, ‘Aminah should go to Africa,’” Kamau said in 2015. “When we got home, I showed Aminah some of the photographs and told her she needed to go to Africa.”
Kamau put together a group to secure funds for Aminah’s Africa trip, and in the process he and Williams set about creating a nonprofit entity, Art for Community Expression, which launched in 1979 with a five-member board of trustees and a dual mission of sending artists to Africa and providing opportunities for Black Americans to exhibit their work in months other than February. “I was kind of influenced by the Harlem Renaissance,” Kamau said. “If that can happen there, why can’t we do something here like that?”
“When we started that board, we were in the second floor of the [Washington Avenue] building, catty-corner from the Columbus Museum of Art. And it was cold! I remember being huddled up there with a space heater,” says Patricia Williams, one of ACE’s original board members who worked at OSU. “Kojo gathered us all together and asked each of us to be that permanent advocate for African American art and artists. … Locally, nothing was really happening. So ACE provided the portal for that to start happening.”
“I think because it was a Black-owned space, we felt comfortable coming to it,” says Linda Fleming-Willis, another founding board member. “There weren’t other places where you could go to be embraced, to walk in and see art that reflected you on the walls.”
ACE’s first board also included Ursel White Lewis, considered Columbus’ first Black arts patron. The working-class owner of a hat shop, Lewis was a mentor to Kamau and donated Black art to the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus State and other Ohio arts institutions. “[Lewis’] advocacy was the precursor to Kojo realizing that we needed a more permanent entity to focus on the works of African American artists,” Williams says. “And not just the national and internationally known artists, but the local artists, because, quite frankly, they were not being shown here. They weren’t even acknowledged and recognized as part of the pantheon of artists that came out of this community.”
Through ACE, Kamau began to play the mentor role, encouraging artists such as Queen Brooks, who read about Kamau in the newspaper. “I didn’t know of any Black photographers or artists really at all, so I decided that I would go by his place. But I had no prior experience with art. I went to his place three times and just looked in the window,” Brooks says. “The third time he came out and said, ‘Why don’t you come in?’ And I said, ‘Because I don’t have any money.’ And he said, ‘Well, you don’t need money to look at art.’ So I went in, and that was the beginning of my art career, because I went back every day to talk to him and look at the art, and I started to meet other artists from the Black community.”
“Everyone Kojo would interact with, he would acknowledge…
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