South Dallas Arts Leaders Target DISD Schools, Youth Programs

Nijeul X, VanAnthony Williams, and Lisa Brown Ross sat down together as three South Dallas arts leaders with new titles and a lot of ground to cover in Dallas ISD.

Williams runs the South Dallas Cultural Center, which carries facility number 573 in the Dallas parks system. Connecting the Cultural Center to schools is his first stated priority. “We can show these kids that they can produce work here, and they can have a gallery opening,” Williams said. “They can experience these things that are important and critical in your development as a young artist.”

That’s not just field-trip talk. Williams wants the Cultural Center operating as an incubator for young artists working in the African diaspora tradition. He’s not blowing up what already exists. The Music Lounge, a quarterly concert series, stays on the calendar. The mixer series, which brings artists together and periodically flies in instructors for master classes, stays too. Neither needed to go. What they needed, Williams decided, was a sharper story told around them.

What he’s building on top of those programs is a harder-to-package thing. Story times. Childhood development work. Author conversations. Programming that reaches beyond ticketed events into everyday community life. And something he can’t put on a calendar: the deliberate cultivation of failure.

“Education and artist incubation,” he said, describing his mission in four words.

He means that literally. Williams wants the Cultural Center to be a place where kids can try things and not succeed without it costing them something. “Providing people the opportunity to fail gloriously, like to strive so hard,” he said, “and providing that space, what it feels like that you’re in a space that you’re capable of trying something and not succeeding and then figuring out how to do it again.”

It’s an odd institutional promise for a venue that hosts gallery openings. But Williams is betting that taking the stigma off creative failure is what pulls in the kids who’d otherwise stay home. Teaching curiosity isn’t secondary to teaching technique. He thinks it’s the same job.

Nijeul X is directing Forest Forward through a more immediate problem. The Forest Forward theater is under construction. X’s near-term mission is getting the building open, and he suggested the full public case for what comes next will wait until the renovation’s done. The scope he’s hinting at sounds large. The walls need to come first.

Lisa Brown Ross leads the African American Museum of Dallas. She joined Williams and X for the roundtable that was reported by Dallas Free Press as part of its ongoing coverage of South Dallas arts leadership. All three took their roles recently. The conversation had the texture of leaders who are still taking stock, still mapping territory, still figuring out what they’ve inherited and what they’ll need to build.

The timing matters because Dallas ISD is not a small system. It serves roughly 140,000 students, and arts access across those campuses isn’t distributed evenly. South Dallas has institutions with long histories and real infrastructure. What they haven’t always had is sustained leadership with both the ambition and the runway to change who walks through the door.

Williams thinks the Cultural Center can change that math. He doesn’t want it to be a place that intimidates the kids it’s supposed to serve. “Providing people the opportunity to fail gloriously, like to strive so hard” isn’t a slogan that fits neatly on a grant application. It’s a commitment that the work of showing up and not getting it right is still worth doing, and that the Cultural Center will be there when a kid’s ready to try again.