Black Love: The Exhale Presented by Centered.PHX
DATE: Feb. 7, 2026
TIME: 6:30-9 p.m., Doors Open 6 p.m.
PRICE: Members & Non-members: $34.95
Admission to this experience includes full access to FRAMERATE: Desert Pulse.
Black Love: The Exhale is a storytelling and live music experience that celebrates the richness, resilience and range of Black love in the heart of the desert. Now in its fourth year at Desert Botanical Garden, Centered.PHX returns with a new offering that honors Black love as Black History. Featuring Black couples from across Arizona, the event highlights real stories of connection, commitment, growth and joy during Black History Month.
Set within the beauty of the Garden, the evening invites guests to witness how love blooms in unexpected places. The desert becomes a living symbol for Black love itself: rooted, adaptive, creative and strong. Just as the Garden nurtures rare and resilient plant life, this program uplifts the rare and powerful stories of partnership, family and community that continue to shape Phoenix today.
This year’s event honors the lineage and love of the couples who came before: Coretta Scott King and Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, Betty Shabazz and Malcolm X, Michelle and Barack Obama to name a few. Their partnerships show us how love has fueled movements, sharpened purpose, carried families through hardship and expanded what freedom could look like. The Arizona couples featured onstage continue that lineage in their own way, contributing new stories to the long continuum of Black love as both anchor and compass.
Couples share how they met, what they built, what they survived and how they learned to breathe freely beside someone who chose them back. These personal stories reflect a wider truth: Black love has always been history-making. It has protected us, restored us, inspired us and reminded us of our humanity when the world tried to deny it.
Black Love: The Exhale creates a shared moment for the community to honor love as history, love as liberation and love as a living, growing force, one that continues to bloom here in Phoenix, even in the desert.
Because Black love is Black history.
Event located at Sunset Pavilion
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