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Scene of the Daisha Board Takes Off M eet the unstoppable Daisha Board. In two short years, she's gone from a budding gallerist with a modest, albeit respected West Dallas footprint to one of the state's boldest dealers on the rise. Along the way, she's elevated the concept of what successful BIPOC programming looks like, forging an exciting market for it among seasoned collectors while cultivating a new pool of engaged beginning art buyers. Board's Beginnings How does one go from a double-decade corporate gig at Fannie Mae as a financial analyst to being the buzziest dealer in Dallas, with a gift for branding that many museum marketing teams would envy. By being a hard-working maverick. Thirty seconds into meeting the charismatic dealer, one word comes to mind: fearless. This is not a woman who will sit by the sidelines; she'll be the Super Bowl MVP or the closer in game seven of the World Series. During our first whirlwind visit to her Sylvan Avenue space — which she will shutter soon to concentrate on her other two locations, including her 7,000-square-foot Tin District Mecca — she told us that she always felt like the entrepreneurial black sheep in a family that successfully embraced the corporate world. Rather than fighting that sense of being the outsider, she embraced it, founding Black Sheep Art Culture in March 2017 as a bridge between white cubes and nontraditional gallery spaces. Four years later, her eponymous brick and mortar was born. Board was an early adopter of BIPOC programming, pre-George Floyd's murder and before COVID, when conversations about diversity and inclusion in the art world were just in their infancy; the term BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), coined in 2013, had not yet spread to the mainstream museum and gallery scene. She told us about her first venture into visual culture, which runs parallel to her recent role as gallerist. "I'm a hip-hop head," she said. "Being from Queens, NYC, hip-hop is in my DNA. Black Sheep's 'The Choice Is Yours' is our anthem. Black Sheep is a metaphor for me feeling like an outsider in the art community in Dallas. It's my desire to carve out my own path in the art world By Catherine D. Anspon. Photography Jacob Carroll. and defy conventional expectations." Board's self-assurance began with her upbringing. Raised in Queens in a middle-class family, she moved to Texas for her mom's corporate job with American Airlines when she was in ninth grade. A star athlete, she went to college at an HBCU, Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida, on a track scholarship. (Her record at the heptathlon still stands, while her university won their conference title twice when she was on the team.) A solid gig at Fannie Mae, a husband in the telecommunications-consulting field, and three children — two sons and a daughter, ages 14 to 23 — followed. In 2016 a layoff happened, and she stepped out of the box. We first heard of this on-the-rise Dallas dealer in 2022 from Houston attorney, realtor, and art-event producer Vernique With an ambitious new Tin District gallery that resembles a kunsthalle, and a jewel-box downtown space adjoining The Joule, Daisha Board stakes her claim for a prominent place at the head of the Texas art table. Queen Daisha Board at her new Tin District gallery Daisha Board Gallery | Tin District 95