Description
The Project:
The Clark Atlanta University Art Museum (CAUAM) requests funding for a collection-based exhibition and accompanying publication, ‘From Black Spring to the Eternal”, that will showcase and explore fifty landscape paintings primarily by mid-20 th -century African American artists. The museum’s director, Maurita Poole, seeks to foreground seldom-seen works from the museum’s holdings and present them according to a new paradigm —the landscape context—rather than in the contexts of biography, chronology, and figuration, habitually employed in the consideration of African American art. CAUAM envisions this project as the first in a series of collection-based exhibitions and publications that will offer deeply considered presentations of discrete collection areas for CAU’s academic community, the cohort of Atlanta colleges and universities more generally, and the general public. One of the overarching goals of this effort is to frame and more effectively convey the role of CAUAM and HBCUs m in the support and proliferation of African American art through pedagogy and collecting.
Rationale for Funding:
The AAP continues to actively search for ways to support collections housed at HBCUs and the caretakers who aim to preserve, study and present them, often against significant financial odds. CAU has been the academic home to some of the most influential African American artists of the 20 th century, including Hale Woodruff, who initiated the annual exhibitions through which the collection began its most concerted growth in the 1940s. CAUAM today has a very notable collection that deserves to be more actively presented.
Maurita Poole has conceived a thoughtful exhibition plan that will go beyond standard approaches to 20 th -century African American art with the intention of opening conversations beyond those centered in essentialist biography. The collection presentation will additionally complement two exhibitions of contemporary art that will explore interactions between ecologies, nature, and people in the American South, thus expanding the relevance of collection landscapes.
The exhibition will be offered through university curricula, as well as to local public audiences and a national audience that is largely unfamiliar with both the holdings and the role of HBCUs in nurturing the growth and dissemination of African American art.
Because the CAUAM is small, grants funds would support contract work by conservators, framers, and art handlers required to prepare and install the exhibition, and the costs associated with the preparation and production of the catalogue. CAUAM would be a first-time AAP grantee.