JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — This Black History Month, art across Jacksonville is doing more than catching the eye. It is preserving stories and creating space for Black history to be seen.
From a Black-owned gallery downtown to a museum exhibit rooted in the city’s Black film history, to murals lining the streets of the Eastside, artists are using their work to connect the community — past and present.
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On Jacksonville’s Eastside, murals stretch across alleyways and building walls, transforming once-blank spaces into open-air galleries filled with color and meaning.
Each mural was shaped by conversations with residents.
“They’re not just art installations,” Kandice Clark, founder and curator of The Petite Jax, said. “They’re conversations about visibility.”
For Clark, art is deeply personal.
“For me, art is kind of like the heartbeat for me. For everything,” she said.
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Inside her downtown gallery, The Petite Jax, a Black History Month exhibit titled “Afromagnetic” fills the walls with bold, expressive works.
“The name Afromagnetic comes from Black creativity just being very magnetic,” Clark said. “It’s a thing that moves the culture — whether it’s through movement, art. It’s just a magnetic force.”
Across town at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, history is preserved through rare film posters dating back to the 1920s. The exhibit highlights Jacksonville’s role in early Black cinema.
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“All-Black cast of us as pilots, us as heroes, heroines — one that broke the mold of what a cast could look like — and that was right here in Jacksonville,” Brianna Sharpe, Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole associate curator at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, said.
Many of those films were created at Norman Studios in Arlington, one of the nation’s first movie studios dedicated to Black filmmakers.
“These were all movies that were made here in Jacksonville, at the Norman Studios in Arlington,” Sharpe said. “There’s one still in full feature today, ‘The Flying Ace.’”
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At a time when opportunities for Black actors and filmmakers were limited, those films carried powerful messages.
“It gives you a picture of what you can be, especially at a time in the 1920s where things were negative,” Sharpe said. “You were deemed to be just one specific thing.”
Art, in all its forms, continues to inspire that sense of possibility.
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“This gives you an opportunity to be seen as better, bigger, brighter,” Sharpe said. “That’s the thing that carries out. Everyone loves to see themselves in the future. This just resonates with that from the 1920s into now.”
And those stories are not confined to one month.
The exhibit at the Cummer is part of its permanent collection and remains on display for most of the year, celebrating Black history not just in February, but year-round.
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