Black art gets talked about as a question of talent, and at the EBONY Power 100 ceremony on November 9, 2026, the woman who owns the magazine named a different variable.
“Without access to capital, you can’t create the art. You can’t do a lot of the community work,” said Eden Bridgeman Sklenar, chief executive of EBONY Media Group. She is in a position to say it. The Bridgeman family bought EBONY and JET in 2021, taking ownership of the two titles after the company’s financial difficulties, and she has run them since.
The 2026 ceremony was held at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles under the theme The Stories We Shape. Bridgeman Sklenar was equally plain about what the list is not supposed to be. “Power 100 is not intended to be a popularity ranking. We really look at impact,” she said.
This year the list carried a new category, the Junior Bridgeman Business Vanguard award, which honors the entrepreneurship and economic empowerment legacy of her father, Ulysses Junior Bridgeman, a businessman and former NBA player. Its inaugural honorees are Latriece Watkins, chief executive of Sam’s Club U.S., Byron Allen, founder of Allen Media Group, Stacy Brown-Philpot, founder of Cherryrock Capital, and Tope Awotona, founder of Calendly. Four people who build and own companies, on a list that usually reads as a list of famous names.
Put the two statements beside each other, and the argument is one argument. A power list that measures impact rather than popularity has to count the people who hold the money, because the money is what decides whether the work gets made at all. That is not an abstraction for her. EBONY and JET came through financial difficulties and into family ownership in 2021, which is the sequence she is describing from the inside.
For a reader, it lands somewhere specific. The question of whether a Black woman gets to make the thing she wants to make is usually asked as a question about her, her talent, her discipline, her reach. Bridgeman Sklenar is saying it is asked in the wrong place. It is decided upstream, by whoever can write the check, and she is one of the people who now can.
