ASAKE BOMANI: What Gets Remembered When You Prop Up Someone Else’s Dream

Nobody talks about the gallery. That’s the thing that’s been gnawing at me for years every time I see another piece about Asake Bomani that leads with Danny Glover’s name in the headline. She ran an art gallery in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, on Buena Vista Avenue West. The Bomani Gallery. She was curating Black art, amplifying Black artists, building an institution in a neighborhood that already had its own mythology — and the conversation somehow always collapses back into who she was married to.

That’s the observation I want to start with. Not bitterness, exactly. More like the slow irritation of watching someone get persistently miscategorized.

Table of Contents

Quick Bio

Detail	Information
Full Name	Asake Bomani
Born	July 1, 1945; Wilmington, Delaware (reported)
Education	San Francisco State University; English major
Early career	Jazz singer, San Francisco
Gallery	Bomani Gallery, 737 Buena Vista Ave West, Haight-Ashbury, SF
Major publication	Paris Connections: African American & Caribbean Artists in Paris (co-editor, 1992)
Award	American Book Award, 1993
TV appearance	Great Railway Journeys (BBC, 1999)
Marriage	Danny Glover, 1975
Divorce filed	February 4, 1999; finalized 2000
Daughter	Mandisa Glover (b. January 5, 1976)

San Francisco in the Sixties: The Meeting That Defined Everything

Here is where it begins, or where the record picks it up, anyway. Asake Bomani is an English major at San Francisco State University in the 1960s. She is already a jazz singer. She has, by all accounts, a formidable sense of herself — Danny Glover would later tell People magazine that she had “a strong sense of morality and high self-esteem,” and the way he phrased it suggests he found it slightly unnerving in the best possible way.

He stood outside her English class and waited. Couldn’t manage a proper sentence when she walked out. Just said “hi” and walked away. That’s the story he told in multiple interviews, and look, I believe it — that particular kind of tongue-tied infatuation tends to be accurate when men remember it decades later.

What I notice is what that detail implies about her. She was not a woman men found easily approachable. She was not someone who made herself smaller. And she was already doing something — singing jazz, studying literature, building a sense of the world through the written word — before he was anything more than an economics student with uncertain prospects.

They marry in 1975. She is thirty. He is twenty-eight. The careers they each have at that point are not symmetrical.

The Model Cities Exit and What It Actually Cost Her

Let me tell you what’s almost never foregrounded in any piece about Asake Bomani, which is that she was the economic and emotional backstop when Danny Glover made the leap that launched his entire career.

He had been working as an evaluator for the San Francisco Model Cities program. A real government job. Then he decided to leave it and join the Black Actors’ Workshop of the American Conservatory Theatre. At the time, this was not obviously a good idea. It was a risk. And the person who absorbed the risk of that decision — financially, practically, emotionally — was Asake Bomani.

Every source that mentions this frames it as her “supporting” him. Which is true, but also flattens what it meant. She was a jazz singer who presumably had her own ambitions and her own projects. She had a daughter born in January 1976, barely a year into the marriage. She kept everything steady while he found out if he could actually act for a living.

He could. We know that. Lethal Weapon is four movies. The Color Purple. To Sleep with Anger. The career built on that early risk is enormous. But you have to ask yourself — what did Asake Bomani put down to make that possible? What songs didn’t get sung, what writing didn’t get written, what gallery show didn’t get curated because someone had to keep the lights on in a Victorian house in Haight-Ashbury while Danny Glover figured out his purpose?

This isn’t a complaint about him. It’s a question about her. And nobody answers it.

The Gallery, Which Deserves Its Own Paragraph

The Bomani Gallery at 737 Buena Vista Avenue West. Haight-Ashbury. The name alone — she named it after herself. That is the action of a person with a clear identity, a claim staked in San Francisco’s cultural geography.

The gallery is most documented in connection with the launch of Paris Connections in early 1992. The book was shown concurrently at Bomani Gallery and Jernigan Wicker Fine Arts from January 14 through February 29 of that year. A 95-page collection co-edited with Belvie Rooks, curated by artist Raymond Saunders, documenting Black American and Caribbean artists who found in Paris a freedom unavailable to them at home.

Think about what that project is, actually. It’s a recovery effort. It’s an act of historical documentation. It asks the question: where do Black American artists go when their own country doesn’t give them room? And the answer the book assembles, through its curation, is Paris — and the answer Bomani provides by editing it is: here. I found them. Here they are.

The American Book Award in 1993 was not a minor recognition. The Before Columbus Foundation, which administers it, specifically honors literary achievement without restriction to race, genre, or commercial profile. It is designed to recognize work that the mainstream publishing world might overlook. Winning it meant something.

But how many of the articles you can find about Asake Bomani mention the gallery independently of the book? Very few. And how many explain the Before Columbus Foundation, what the award means, why it matters? Almost none.

The Contradictions in the Record

Let’s be honest about the state of the information here, because it is not clean.

Sources give her net worth as anywhere from $1 million to $40 million. One source lists it as $40 million, which would make her wealthier than Danny Glover’s estimated fortune. That figure is plainly invented. The divorce settlement, when it was filed on the grounds of irreconcilable differences in February 1999, was never publicly detailed. Nobody has access to those numbers. The $40 million figure is just someone typing a number that sounded impressive and other sites copying it.

The publication date of Paris Connections is listed as 1991 in some sources, 1992 in others, and 1993 in a few that appear to have conflated the book’s publication with the award year. The actual QED Press edition is dated 1992, with the ArtBoulevard database noting “June 1992.” The American Book Award was 1993. That much appears solid.

Her birthplace is given as “United States” by most celebrity sites, and “Wilmington, Delaware” by a more detailed source — specifically the MoxBlog piece on Mandisa Glover, which appears to have drawn on a richer secondary source, possibly a profile piece. I can’t independently verify Wilmington. But it’s the most specific detail we have, so I’ll take it over the vague national attribution.

One source calls her a “reality TV star.” She is not and was never a reality TV star. That appears to be a content farm misidentifying the BBC documentary Great Railway Journeys, in which she appeared in 1999, as a reality television program. It’s a BBC travel documentary. She was a guest, sharing perspective on African American cultural history through the lens of travel. The misclassification tells you everything about the quality of the sources in this ecosystem.

The 1999 Timing and What It Meant

Here is a detail that sits uncomfortably. Asake Bomani appeared on Great Railway Journeys in 1999. Danny Glover filed for divorce on February 4, 1999. These two events are simultaneous.

I don’t know what that tells us. Maybe nothing. Television shoots are planned months in advance, and a BBC documentary appearance was likely scheduled well before the divorce filing. But what it suggests is that Asake Bomani, in the same year her marriage of twenty-four years was being legally dissolved, was also appearing on international television to talk about African American cultural history through the frame of travel and place.

She was not collapsed. She was not retreating. She was doing the work.

What Danny Glover Said and What It Means

In a 1992 People interview, Glover described Bomani as a woman he had always been infatuated with, saying she possessed “a strong sense of morality and high self-esteem.” In a later interview, he described her as his “first love” and said that despite the divorce, they maintained a genuine friendship. Mandisa Glover herself, in documented contexts, has spoken warmly of both parents.

You can read those quotes as the gracious maintenance of public image after a difficult split. That’s one reading. But you can also take them at face value. They were together for roughly thirty years if you count from when they met in the late 1960s to the divorce finalization in 2000. That’s not a disaster. That’s a life.

The reason the “irreconcilable differences” reason bothers me slightly is that it tells you nothing. It is the legal synonym for “we are not going to explain this to you.” Danny Glover at the height of his career, traveling constantly, politically active across multiple continents, carrying an enormous public profile — and Asake Bomani managing a gallery in San Francisco, raising a daughter, writing and curating cultural history. The structural pressures on a marriage like that are not mysterious. But we don’t actually know.

The Quiet After 2000

After the divorce, the public record of Asake Bomani thins to almost nothing. This is consistent and intentional. She was never a celebrity in her own right — she was a cultural worker, an editor, a gallery owner, a jazz singer who operated in a serious professional world but not a media-saturated one. Without the marriage as a connection point, there’s no mechanism pulling her back into coverage.

Danny Glover remarried in 2009, to Eliane Cavalleiro, a gender and race professor at Stanford. In 2022, that marriage terminated in divorce. He has now publicly revealed an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, with his daughter Mandisa as a central figure in his care. The coverage of that story mentions Asake Bomani only in the “first marriage” biographical sidebar. She appears, she disappears.

Mandisa Glover, their daughter, built a career around food, studied history and French at Mills College and San Francisco State University, and has remained close to both parents. One source notes that some filmmakers describe themselves as friends with both Mandisa and Asake, sharing Thanksgiving celebrations. That’s the most recent social context we have for where Bomani is positioned in the world — embedded in family, connected to community, largely off the record.

The Coverage Problem, Stated Plainly

Look — the way this woman’s story gets told is structurally identical to the way June Baranco’s or a hundred other women’s stories get told. She won the American Book Award. She ran a gallery. She co-edited a text that sits in the bibliographies of scholarly articles about African American art history — I can find it cited in the Wikipedia article on Edward Clark, the abstract expressionist painter, for example. That’s documentary evidence of real intellectual work that persists in the record.

And still the headline is “Danny Glover’s ex-wife.” Still the bio tables lead with “Famous for: Being Danny Glover’s wife.” One source lists her occupation as “Philanthropist, Supportive Partner.” A philanthropist. Based on what evidence? No charity is named. No foundation. No event. It’s a label applied to fill a biographical cell that the writer had no actual information for.

The irony is that her real story — jazz singer who backed her partner’s career transition, gallery owner in Haight-Ashbury, scholar-editor of Black expatriate art history, American Book Award winner — is more interesting than “supportive partner.” It just requires more than three minutes of research to tell.

Final Words

My honest judgment: Asake Bomani is someone who was consistently more than the frame applied to her, and who appears to have known that well enough to stop trying to correct the record.

She was a jazz singer with enough cultural authority that a future Hollywood star was literally too nervous to speak to her when she was twenty years old. She ran a gallery named after herself. She edited a book about Black artists finding freedom in Paris — a subject that requires you to understand both art history and the particular geography of racial exile. She won a meaningful award for that work. She appeared on international television in the same year her marriage fell apart, discussing history and culture with apparent ease.

That is not a supporting character’s story. It’s the story of someone who had a full life that occasionally overlapped with a famous man’s, and who has been redefined entirely by that overlap in the public record.

The quiet bitterness I carry about this isn’t directed at anyone in particular. It’s directed at the machine — the content economy, the celebrity biography industrial complex, the sites that scrape each other’s incomplete summaries and produce “she had a strong sense of morality” without asking what she wrote about, what she hung on the gallery walls, what songs she sang.

You want to know Asake Bomani? Start with the book. It’s 95 pages. It’s on Amazon. It won an award in 1993. That’s where she put herself on the record.

FAQs

1. Who is Asake Bomani?

An American author, jazz singer, gallery owner, and cultural curator. She is also the former wife of actor Danny Glover, which is unfortunately the frame most coverage uses to introduce her.

2. When was Asake Bomani born?

July 1, 1945. She is eighty years old as of 2025. One source places her birthplace as Wilmington, Delaware; most leave it vague as “United States.”

3. What is Asake Bomani famous for?

She won the American Book Award in 1993 for co-editing Paris Connections: African American & Caribbean Artists in Paris with Belvie Rooks. She also ran the Bomani Gallery in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.

4. Was Asake Bomani married to Danny Glover?

Yes. They met at San Francisco State University in the 1960s, married in 1975, and divorced in 2000 after Glover filed for divorce in February 1999 citing irreconcilable differences.

5. Why did Asake Bomani and Danny Glover divorce?

The official filing cited irreconcilable differences, which tells you nothing. The real reasons were never publicly stated by either party. They reportedly remained on good terms after.

6. What is Asake Bomani’s book about?

Paris Connections: African American & Caribbean Artists in Paris documents Black American and Caribbean artists who lived and worked in Paris — a city that offered them creative and social freedoms that the United States frequently denied them.

7. Did Asake Bomani support Danny Glover’s acting career?

Yes, meaningfully. When Glover left his stable government job to join the Black Actors’ Workshop in the 1970s, she provided financial and emotional support. He has acknowledged this in multiple interviews.

8. What is Asake Bomani’s net worth?

Unknown and likely unknowable. Figures ranging from $1 million to $40 million appear in celebrity content sites; none are sourced and the spread tells you the numbers are invented.

9. Does Asake Bomani have children?

Yes. One daughter, Mandisa Glover, born January 5, 1976, in San Francisco. Mandisa went on to build a career in the food industry and has remained close to both parents.

10. What happened to Asake Bomani after the divorce?

She has lived privately. The most recent public reference to her places her in a network of friends and family connected to Mandisa Glover. She has not given public interviews or sought media attention since the divorce.

11. Is Asake Bomani related to the Nigerian musician also called Asake?

No. The Nigerian Afrobeats artist known as Asake (born Ahmed Ololade) is a different person entirely. The confusion is generated entirely by content mills that wrote about both and got their names tangled. They share no connection.

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