Bronzeville Collective: Revitalizing Creativity in a Historic Neighborhood

The Black Holocaust museum’s sleek and contemporary building dazzles at first sight. What it has in style, it lacks in character as it mimics the designs of many modern museums. However, next to it lies an older building, more distinctive and regaler in its design. Reeking of history and adorned with murals, this is the home of the Bronzeville Collective founded and owned by Tiffany Miller and Lilo Allen.

“There’s been a resurgence in shopping throughout the pandemic. There’s a health pandemic, but also the racism pandemic,” said Allen. “People are being more intentional about buying black, buying local support in support of community-based businesses over like the big box retailers.”

The Bronzeville Collective is a collaborative storefront that emphasizes meeting local creatives at the intersection of visibility and accessibility. As a black-owned collaborative business, it features over 30 different black, brown, queer and ally-owned brands.

“We’ve been collaborating for four years “said Miller “We have been collaborating for years, various events throughout the city, we both said what the heck and applied to these two programs, RISE MKE and POP-UP MKE, and we both had the philosophy that if one of us wins, we both win, and we won.”

RISE MKE is a program that is designed to empower black entrepreneurs through a 14-week program, ending in a pitch competition that serves as a culmination of the curriculum. The POP-UP MKE initiative is a program that allows local businesses owners to set up shop in a temporary retail space and provides them with business and technical support from the initiative.

“We were able to leverage a lease agreement with the owner of the building after the POP-UP MKE experience ended,” said Miller, “we’ve been lucky to still be in the space that we started off in, and our permanency here has helped the revitalization of other spaces so that collaborative relationship extends beyond these walls.”

The collective also homages its name with the neighborhood it is located in; Bronzeville is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Milwaukee. It was historically the epicenter of the city’s jazz scene, as well as being home to many black businesses. Due to freeway construction in the 1960s, many of these businesses and jazz clubs no longer exist. However, there has been a slow effort to rejuvenate the neighborhood, such as the Bronzeville Cultural and Arts Festival, an annual festival  

“The main goal was to, like, pay homage to Old Bronzeville, which is at one point it was the financial epicenter of Milwaukee for black Milwaukee,” said one of them. “In fact, this building used to be a black-owned dentist’s office, it’s important for us to carry that [legacy] on.”

The Bronzeville Collective is located on North Avenue, next to America’s Black Holocaust Museum.