The typewriter stayed home. Everything else about this exhibition is a tour.
At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs opened September 17 at the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, the first stop on a nine-city national tour organized by the National Museum of African American History and Culture with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. It holds more than 130 objects drawn from the collections of five universities: Clark Atlanta, Florida A&M, Jackson State, Texas Southern, and Tuskegee. Among them sits the typewriter W.E.B. Du Bois used at Atlanta University, lent by the city where he wrote with it.
What is in the room
The objects argue that HBCUs were never only schools. There are first-edition works by Margaret Walker, who taught at Jackson State for three decades. There is art by Elizabeth Catlett and John Biggers, and the mural tradition carried by Hale Woodruff, whose panels still anchor Clark Atlanta’s own art history. There is archival photography, documents, and multimedia, and a place of honor for WCLK, Clark Atlanta’s jazz station, honored as an archive in its own right, decades of Black Atlanta recorded one broadcast at a time.
Each object comes from a campus museum or archive, which is the exhibition’s real subject. These collections exist because HBCU librarians, professors, and alumni saved what larger institutions, for most of a century, declined to keep.
Five years of consortium work
The exhibition grows out of the HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium, a Smithsonian initiative that spent five years helping member schools digitize archives, art collections, and ephemera, and train the people who care for them. It is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and a bequest from Dr. Beryl Carter Rice, with exhibition support from the Southern Company Foundation, Google Arts & Culture, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, and others.
“This unique exhibition is our gift to Atlanta,” said Dr. Danille Taylor, the CAU Art Museum’s director, “demonstrating the powerful community of practice the HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium developed over five years of partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Taylor has pointed to the gap the work fills: the exhibition shows how art documents history in ways other institutions have not acknowledged, because for generations they were not collecting it.
The people doing the saving
The museum is programming the argument, not just hanging it. On Saturday, October 24, at 1 p.m., a panel called “Memory Working” gathers HBCU alumni now running the nation’s memory institutions: Dr. Kimberley Bugg of the AUC Woodruff Library, Dr. Meredith Evans, director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, Dr. Clint Fluker of Emory’s Rose Library, and LaStarsha McGarity, conservator and co-director of the Legacy Museum at Tuskegee. On December 5, a closing program takes up the murals of Woodruff and Biggers with Texas Southern’s Dr. Alvia Wardlaw. All programs are free.
The museum, on the second floor of Trevor Arnett Hall at 223 James P. Brawley Drive, is open Tuesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The exhibition runs through December 11 before it travels.
Eight more cities will get their turn with these objects. Atlanta got them first, in a museum on a campus that has been keeping Black history since before the Smithsonian thought to ask, which is rather the point of the show.
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