Bronzeville Center for Arts Loses Its Main Donor

Conceptual, non-site-specific rendering of Bronzeville Center for the Arts. Rendering by Wilson & Ford Design Studios.

From the beginning, Milwaukee philanthropist Deborah Kern was critical to the project to create the Bronzeville Center for the Arts, a new art museum to be located at North Avenue and Martin Luther King Dr. The location was symbolic, in the Bronzeville neighborhood that had once been the vibrant center of the Black community in Milwaukee, and the museum would “celebrate and elevate the history and heritage of African American art.”

The nonprofit’s first federal tax form, for the 2021 year, shows the organization had a budget of $312,283, with basically all the money coming from Kern. She donated just over $418,000 to the group that year.

Kern donated another $6.43 million in 2022 and $3.9 million in 2023, for a total of nearly $11 million. Over those three years Kern provided about 96% of all contributions and grants to the organization, the tax forms show.

Those grants helped support the rising expenses for the Bronzeville Center, which spent just over $633,000 in 2022 and just over $700,000 in 2023. That left it with $9.8 million in assets, some 94% of it from Kern.

There was no announcement about these gifts. Kern has always preferred to give anonymously. She provided nearly all the donations to the Milwaukee Artist Resource Network, some $4 million, as Urban Milwaukee has reported, but insisted on anonymity. Kern comes from the wealthy family which bankrolled the conservative Kern Family Foundation, but she seems to differ with its politics and has devoted her giving to the arts, something the foundation eschews.

By early 2023 the Bronzeville museum project had a conceptual design for a 50,000-square-foot “world-class art and cultural center,” with an estimated price tag of $55 million, as Urban Milwaukee reported. Gov. Tony Evers had proposed a grant of $5 million in state funding, which the Republicans killed, but he later used federal American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to provide the grant.

The group had also built out a space on Finlayson (formerly 5th St. ) and North Ave. which included Gallery 507, a showcase for Black art, and a headquarters for planning the new museum.

Kern was very committed to the project, putting in 10 hours per week, serving as chair of the governance committee overseeing the proposed museum. She may also have given more money to the group in 2024: its managing director John Russick said the organization had received a $25 million anonymous donation in a June 2024 story by Tom Jenz.

That could mean Kern gave an additional $15 million as Russick said the group had a total of $25 million plus the $5 million from the state. As for the remaining $25 million that would need to be raised, Russick said the group hoped to launch a capital campaign in 2025 that would also raise endowment money, perhaps raising the goal to as much as $30 million.

But it’s now May and no campaign has been launched. Perhaps that’s because the group has lost its key donor: Kern has resigned from the board, sources told Urban Milwaukee. When asked about her work with the group Kern responded via email to say, “I have stepped away from the BCA.”

Even before her departure, the project had faced “a series of starts and stops,” as Jenz wrote. “Progress has been intermittent.”

In March of 2023, the organization announced it had hired Robert Parker as its first Chief Executive Officer. A press release by the organization described him as someone who specialized “in building organizations from the ground up, included leading the design and development” of the $36 million Chickasaw Heritage Center in Tupelo, Mississippi, including “spearheading a fundraising campaign that raised $30 million in just two years.”

It seemed like a coup for the organization, but it’s not clear how long Parker served: he was not listed as staff member on the federal tax form covering the 2023 year and by March 2024 was announced as taking a job with The Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture.

Perhaps to fill that void, Russick was quietly hired in February 2024 as managing director. Russick has long experience with museums, including 24 years at the Chicago History Museum, including a post as senior vice president.

Urban Milwaukee received no response to its requests for comment by the Bronzeville Center for the Arts’s leadership. The clock is ticking for Bronzeville project. The ARPA funding must be spent by the end of 2026. The good news is that its a splashy project that has gotten a good deal of attention and has raised $25 million in private money. The bad news is it has to raise at least this much after losing its biggest supporter.

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