✨ Rooted in Healing. Sustained by Vision. Evolving in Justice & Power.

Celebrating 25 Years of Wisdom

Twenty-five years ago, a circle of young women gathered at Detroit’s historic Lewis College of Business, carrying notebooks, dreams, and the weight of their worlds. They came seeking something they couldn’t yet name, and found it in each other. Through poetry, performance, and prayer, they created a sanctuary where art became medicine and sisterhood became a movement. From that small circle grew the Wisdom Institute, a Black women-led organization rooted in healing, justice, and the radical belief that our stories can change systems.

Today, the Wisdom Institute stands as a living archive of resilience and imagination. For a quarter century, we have turned pain into power, silence into song, and stories into strategies that have shaped the landscape of water justice, housing security, and reproductive freedom in Detroit and beyond.

As we celebrate our 25th anniversary, we honor not only where we’ve been, but where we’re going. Our Artist Showcase & Auction Fundraiser is more than an event; it is a living gallery of community truth-telling. Each painting, sculpture, and performance is a testimony to the mothers, daughters, and dreamers who refused to disappear, and to the artists who remind us that creativity is both resistance and repair.

This evening invites you to witness art as advocacy, to see how brushstrokes become calls to action, how songs carry memory, and how storytelling can heal generations. It’s a celebration of our shared commitment to build a Detroit where every voice counts, every family thrives, and every drop of water is valued as sacred.

Your presence and support sustain this vision. Every ticket, every bid, every conversation contributes to the next chapter, where Wisdom will nurture the next generation of artists, healers, leaders, and change-makers. Together, we’re investing in a future where creativity fuels justice and where art continues to do what it has always done best: make us whole. Please bid & donate generously.

Cicely & LaTanya

Co-Directors, Wisdom Institute

Wisdom Institute's 25th Anniversary Fundraiser

Artist Showcase & Auction