A hundred artists of color are setting up shop this weekend inside the Norton Healthcare Sports & Learning Center, turning the West Louisville venue's arena floor into a sprawling marketplace of sculptures, paintings and installations for the third annual Artists & Afros. The event runs from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday in Louisville's Russell neighborhood, giving artists like Marcus Cosby a rare chance to sell directly to collectors without a gallery standing in the way.
Cosby, who has developed his artistic skills throughout his life, is among the featured creators this year, according to WLKY. He told the station that tapping into purpose and honing one's craft can develop into something greater, and said he's more focused on building connections than closing sales — reaching out to others, he said, reveals a community for people like him.
Creative director Shauntrice Black, who founded the event, has framed Artists & Afros as a direct response to how little of the art world's money reaches Black creators. She told WLKY the global art market is worth $60 billion and that Black artists receive only about 2% of it, a disparity the fair was built to address. Independent market research backs up the scale of that gap: the 2022 Burns Halperin Report found that works by Black American artists generated $3.6 billion between 2008 and mid-2022, roughly 2 percent of the $186.9 billion international art auction market during that span, according to The Art Newspaper. The same report found that Black American female artists accounted for just 0.5 percent of acquisitions by major U.S. museums between 2008 and 2020, per the National Museum of Women in the Arts' reporting on the study.
From Craft Fair to Regional Institution
Black wants the event to make a real impact in Louisville, which she has described as an up-and-coming art city, per WLKY. That ambition has grown quickly: in its inaugural October 2024 debut, Artists & Afros welcomed over 1,000 visitors to the Norton Healthcare Sports & Learning Center and generated more than $100,000 in combined sales for 30 participating artists, according to a Norton Sports & Learning Center announcement. This year's lineup has grown to 100 creators from across the country, offering pieces meant for homes, offices and other spaces.
Black also operates under the name Shauntrice Martin and founded OKIKE, the organization that co-produces the event. Before Artists & Afros, she launched Feed the West, a mutual-aid initiative that distributed free groceries to 50,000 families in West Louisville, according to the Pulitzer Center. The 2026 fair involves OKIKE, the Sports & Learning Center and E&S Gallery.
An Installation Appears During the Fair
The installation, Childhood Interrupted, is appearing at the venue during the event; it made its official debut June 6, 2026, at Farmington Historic Plantation.
The venue hosting all of it carries its own backstory of reinvestment in the Russell neighborhood. The Sports & Learning Center held its ribbon-cutting on March 9, 2021, for a $53 million, 24-acre complex built on a former industrial brownfield site, according to the Reinvestment Fund. During construction, the Louisville Urban League directed 40 percent of that budget to Black-owned businesses and contractors, creating 302 local jobs, per SportsEvents Magazine's reporting at the time.
A Track That Becomes an Art Gallery
The 90,000-square-foot complex features a 4,000-seat indoor arena and a 200-meter hydraulic banked track.
