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By Lori Acken, MKE Lifestyle
Ra Joy didn’t come to Milwaukee solely to run an arts organization. He came to help build a cultural institution with the potential to transform a neighborhood and, he hopes, the city itself.
Last fall, the former Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor for the National Endowment for the Arts under the Biden administration was scouting a role in which he could continue advocating for the arts while using them to educate, uplift and strengthen individuals, communities and beyond. Encouraged by his friend and mentor Kim Sajet — former director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and now the Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director of the Milwaukee Art Museum — Joy took a closer look at Milwaukee.
When Sajet arrived in September 2025, she embraced the city’s vibrant arts community and its potential to play an even greater role in Milwaukee’s civic development. A fellow believer in that “ecosystem” philosophy, Joy accepted the position of executive director of the Bronzeville Center for the Arts just a few months later.
“Kim has done much to help establish the art museum as more of a community gathering space. It’s a philosophy that is central to who I am, and also very much the DNA of the BCA — this idea of centering community and supporting an ecosystem. In our instance of Black artists and cultural producers,” says Joy, an artist who grew up in a family of artists.“
That vision is already taking shape at Gallery 507, the North Avenue gallery and gift shop that serves as the Bronzeville Center for the Arts’ headquarters. The intimate space offers visitors a glimpse of the cornerstone of Joy’s role — the African American art museum that will one day become the organization’s permanent home.
“I describe [Gallery 507] as a very small appetizer for the much, much bigger entrée to come in our forever home,” Joy says, crediting curator Phoenix Brown for much of the gallery’s success. “But we are ready to grow. We are literally bursting at the seams here.”
For Joy, whose career spans local and federal arts policy, museum leadership and community-centered cultural advocacy, the challenge is energizing. The future museum, spanning the entire block of 2300 N. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, will celebrate the richness of Black art and culture while serving as both a neighborhood gathering place and an international platform for artists of African descent. “We’re creating a community treasure, a cultural anchor and a source of civic pride right here in the heart of Milwaukee’s Bronzeville Cultural and Entertainment District,” Joy says.
The coming months will mark several important steps toward that goal.
This fall, the BCA will present Building Bronzeville: Milwaukee’s Black Arts Movement, an exhibition honoring the artists, institutions and creative energy that established Bronzeville as one of the Midwest’s most vibrant Black cultural communities — one that drew legends like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday to its jazz clubs.
The Center will also unveil its first formal Scope of Collections Statement. “We’ll be announcing to the world what our new museum will collect and why it matters,” Joy says. “It will serve as a north star for our stewardship and collecting activities and send a very powerful message about how serious this institution is when it comes to preserving and presenting our cultural treasures.”
Joy is also developing a national speaker series that will bring influential museum leaders, curators and cultural innovators to Milwaukee. Among the first confirmed guests is Secretary of the Smithsonian Lonnie Bunch, who previously served as the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.
Joy hopes every exhibition, event and conversation will reinforce the philosophy that shapes both him and the BCA: Artists and community must remain at its heart. — Lori Acken
