Left of Center Gallery continues its journey as a cultural hub and home for Black art in Las Vegas

“What is your gallery?”

It’s a question Vicki Richardson, artist and founder of Left of Center Gallery, gets asked a lot. But after some 30 years since the North Las Vegas gallery and nonprofit first opened, a better question might be, what isn’t it?

To many Black and brown artists in the Las Vegas community, it’s been a stepping stone to greater opportunities. To other creatives, who’ve thrived in the arts elsewhere, it’s a home base. To art students, it’s an institute of knowledge, a space where they can expand upon and give chase to their creative whims. To the general public, it’s something of a revelation.

Vicki Richardson, founder and president of the Left of Center Gallery, holds a Bongo Mask from the Kuba People of the Congo.

Tucked away in a quiet residential neighborhood on West Gowan Road, Left of Center Gallery may as well be on its own island. It’s easy to miss and not much to look at from the outside, but at the threshold another world awaits. Several, actually.

The works of local art mavens like Justin Favela, Nancy Good, Jerry Misko, Chase R. McCurdy, Lance L. Smith and Mikayla Whitmore have all cycled through Left of Center, anointing the gallery with a spectrum of cultural experiences. Social justice exhibits, such as 2021’s Bending the Arc, have also challenged societal norms, inspired reflection and demanded we change. Meanwhile, a collection of rarified African art—sculptures, masks, tapestries and more—adorns the gallery’s second floor, shaping it into a heritage-rich gala of artifacts, many of which were donated from Richardson’s own personal collection.

“It’s one of those rare sites in the Valley that can transport you pretty much anywhere. I think it rivals pretty much any large museum institution anywhere I’ve been because of that careful selection and just stewardship of BIPOC vision,” says Erica Vital-Lazare, a local literary artist and College of Southern Nevada professor who sits on Left of Center Gallery’s board of directors.

“I can’t even express the level of abstract imagery that’s come through there. Figurative imagery that reflects Black and brown life, of course, but then these abstract artists give me a sense of the otherworldly. Vicki’s not a traditionalist in that sense that you might equate with a gallery that’s been around for more than 20 years.”

Open since the late 1980s, Left of Center Gallery became a nonprofit organization in 1997 and has remained a communal institution of North Las Vegas ever since.

“There’s no other place that I would rather be if I were living in Las Vegas, other than on the fringes like we have been,” says the 79-year-old Richardson, who moved to the Valley more than 30 years ago. “I’ve always been unafraid to extend myself for something that I felt was valuable, something that I thought was helping other people.”

That moral stance dates back decades for Richardson, who attended Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, a historically Black liberal arts college known for its sit-in demonstrations, which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called, “the best organized and most disciplined in the southland,” during the civil rights movement.

Art played a role in that activism, and Richardson got firsthand experience with it. Aaron Douglas, one of the most influential artists of the Harlem Renaissance and a member of the Fisk faculty, left a lasting impression on her, a religion and philosophy major at the time.

“I had a lot of admiration ... He was just fascinating and encouraging,” she says. “When he was looking over my paperwork, I had illustrations in there, and he said, ‘You should be over here.’ So I said ‘Maybe I should.’ That’s what got me from religion and philosophy into art.”

Freedom, she says, resided in the art classrooms of Fisk. And as racial and political unrest ran rampant, art began to take on new power and meaning for Richardson.

“It’s more than just being able to paint a pretty flower, to get the technique,” she says. “It also gives you an avenue to change people’s minds, to grow yourself, to get your ideas on that paper and across to people, to challenge people when they look at your art.”

Richardson would go on to instill those teachings at inner-city schools in troubled areas of the South Side, where she taught art while getting her master’s degree at the University of Chicago.

At the time, she was a member of an experimental group of educators, sent in to create a multidisciplinary curriculum approach for schools being racially integrated. Richardson specifically asked to teach at the more racially diverse schools, and she would choose to invest in another when she moved to Las Vegas in 1979 to teach at Rancho High School.

“Practice, Practice,” 1987, by Sylvester Collier

“I had a lot of people telling me ‘No, yo

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