Arsht Awards: Marshall L. Davis
For more than 40 years, the Arsht Education Champion Award honoree has been changing lives at Miami's African Heritage Cultural Arts Center.
By Jake Cline
When Marshall L. Davis learned he had been named the recipient of the first-ever Arsht Education Champion Award, a recognition of the four decades he has spent directing the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (AHCAC) in Miami, his thoughts turned not to his accomplishments but to the things he still wants to achieve. An award to Davis is as much a challenge as it is an honor.
“It’s a goal for me that if you got an award for what you’ve done,” Davis says, “you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to do things better.”
As Davis has demonstrated since joining the AHCAC in December 1983, he has no shortage of ideas on how to make things better for the Black youth of Miami-Dade County. For example:
“One of the projects that’s very, very exciting, very beneficial to some of our students,” he says, “is we have a benefactor that has allocated $75,000 for the next five years so that students who participate in our music program can receive their own instrument. It’s an instrument that would be theirs for life. They can take it home, develop their skills. That’s coupled with us providing those students who are identified to come to our program for a whole year at no cost.”
Initially, five children per year in the center’s music program were to receive instruments. “But we talked [the benefactor] into doing something differently,” Davis says. “He raised it to 15 kids. Next year, 15 more kids will get an instrument.”
(Marshall L. Davis, center, poses with dance students and instructors at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center. Photo courtesy African Heritage Cultural Arts Center.)
Thousands of children have participated in the AHCAC’s arts programs since the center opened in 1975. Current programs on the center’s calendar include a long-running afterschool program; a spring arts workshop; the Kuumba winter arts workshop (“Kuumba” is Swahili for “creativity”); and a summer program that serves more than 200 kids. That is in addition to a cinematic arts program, technical training courses and a host of apprenticeship programs.
Davis and his team are not, however, interested in simply producing art lovers or professional artists, though prominent AHCAC alumni include Academy Award-winning screenwriter and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, former Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater artistic director Robert Battle, jazz pianist Willerm Delisfort and choreographer and actress Bianca Brewton. “I wanted to develop a program in which the kids would be impacted through their whole life experience,” Davis says, “whether they chose to be an artist or not.”
Davis, who earned his BFA at Florida Atlantic University and has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Arts & Culture and other organizations, says arts education is never just about learning to dance, sing or act, anyway.
“When you’re doing drama, you’re doing reading comprehension,” he says. “When you do the band program, you’re doing fractions, fraction counts — half notes, those kinds of things. It’s a very effective way of showing kids how their academic skills can be used in a practical way.”
(Marshall L. Davis celebrated 40 years as managing director of the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in December 2023. Photo courtesy African Heritage Cultural Arts Center.)
Under Davis’ leadership, the AHCAC has become a model for Black arts centers around the country. In January, Davis participated in a panel titled “Empowering Communities Through Art” in Gainesville, which is home to the University of Florida and yet lacks a cultural center that serves the Black community. While an effort is underway to remedy that, a recent $100,000 study found no suitable location exists to house such a center in East Gainesville, the city’s predominantly Black neighborhood.
“My message to them was there is no time to wait,” says Davis, noting how dance and visual arts classes at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center are taught inside buildings that once housed a gas station and a meat market. “There is no excuse for Gainesville or any of us not doing what we have to do. We just have to have the compassion and put our dollars where our compassion is to save kids’ lives.”
(Top: Photo of Marshall L. Davis courtesy African Heritage Cultural Arts Center.)