The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art is celebrating its 30th anniversary by turning to the strongest argument it owns: its collection. Between Here & Infinity, open now and running through December 12, gathers nearly 70 works by Black women artists, every one of them drawn from the museum’s permanent holdings, and spreads them across both of the museum’s galleries for the first time in its history.
The exhibition opened in two waves. The Bank of America Gallery at the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation & the Arts went first, on September 9. The gallery in the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Academic Center followed on October 1. A visitor who saw only the September opening has half the show.
Five layers of atmosphere
Dr. Chaunesti Webb-Johnson, the museum’s Curator of Collections, organized the works into five sections named for the layers of the atmosphere. The Root grounds the collection in origin and tradition. The Threshold takes up crossings and transitional space. The Interior turns inward, toward intimacy and quiet. The Expanse is the electric one, conceptually daring and saturated with color. The Horizon is where the past meets the future.
The artist list runs to 51 names across painting, sculpture, photography, textiles, film, and mixed media. Selma Burke and Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, who taught art at Spelman in the early 1930s in the era of Hale Woodruff, hang in the same exhibition as Kara Walker, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Harmonia Rosales, and Zanele Muholi. Elizabeth Catlett, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems fill out a roster that reads like a syllabus for the last century of Black women’s art. Archival material from the Spelman College Archives runs alongside the art, documenting the museum’s first three decades.
A museum with one subject
The museum, which opened in 1996, is devoted to art by and about women of the African Diaspora, and the anniversary show is funded accordingly. Support came from the Mellon Foundation, the Lauren Amos Foundation, the Paul R. Jones Heritage Fund of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, and the Friends of the Museum Fund.
“Between Here & Infinity brings a fresh view to the evolving Spelman collection, staging conversations between works across media and across time,” said museum director Liz Andrews. “This vibrant presentation underscores the generations of curators and artists who have dreamed this museum into existence and made it a place where Black women’s artistic expression is at the center of art history and futures.”
The practical details: the museum sits at 440 Westview Drive in Atlanta, open Wednesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m., with a suggested donation of $5. Full exhibition details are on the Spelman College Museum pages.
Thirty years in, the museum is not borrowing masterpieces to prove its point. It collected them.
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