UMMA to exhibit works from Spelman College's collection of Black women's art

This story is part of a series about arts and culture in Washtenaw County. It is made possible by the Ann Arbor Art Center, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, Destination Ann Arbor, Larry and Lucie Nisson, and the University Musical Society.

An upcoming exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) will celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Atlanta's Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, one of the nation’s only museums to focus exclusively on art by and for women of the African diaspora. The exhibit, "Silver Linings," will run Aug. 24-Jan. 5, featuring 40 works from the Spelman collection.
 
"This is going to be an incredibly unique opportunity for people in Ann Arbor and the surrounding area to access many works by artists who are canonical to African-American and U.S. art," says julia elizabeth neal, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Michigan and guest curator of "Silver Linings."
 
Spelman College is a renowned, historically Black college for women. It was founded in 1881, when most Black women (as well as men) were barred from studying at other educational institutions.
 
neal, who is from Atlanta and taught at Spelman from 2022 to 2023, calls "Silver Linings" "a really well-balanced show in terms of genre," featuring works of abstraction, figuration, and photography, among others.
 
neal refers to Spelman College as a "critical site" because of its generations-long "investment in the cultivation of predominantly Black women students, but also in the building, institutionalization, and historicizing of their increasing arts collection." Spelman "always recognized the value of integrating the arts in a healthy and balanced humanist education," neal says.
 
"Silver Linings" includes artworks that span the range of what neal refers to as "Black aesthetic development." For example, "Hottentot Venus," by the acclaimed photographer Renee Cox, will be featured in the exhibit.
 
The image references Sarah Baartman, a woman of the nomadic South African Khoikhoi tribe. In the early 19^th century, Baartman was exhibited in Europe, where white colonizers presented her naked body as an attraction to be either ridiculed or "exhibited in pseudo-scientific and racist cases that essentialized and also denigrated the Black female body based off of its shape as well as its size," neal says.
 
In "Hottentot Venus" (a name that was pejoratively used to refer to Baartman and other African women), Cox portrays herself as Baartman, with sculpted metal breasts and buttocks strapped to her body.
 
In doing so, neal says, Cox essentially performed "an intervention in representational art histories by placing her body in context around the constructions of Black femininity and Black female sexuality."
 
In addition to Cox's work, "Silver Linings" will also feature art by notable artists including Betty Blayton, Howardena Pindell, Benny Andrews, and Elizabeth Catlett.
 
By presenting "Silver Linings," neal says, "UMMA is actively amplifying the long-term work of generations of Black women, intellectuals, and artists by utilizing their space to identify and present [Black artists] and to lift up their historical investment in building such an important collection."
 
UMMA is offering guided tours of the exhibit presented by curators including neal and Liz Andrews. More information on those tours is available on the exhibit's website.
 
Alongside the exhibit itself, UMMA has partnered with Ypsilanti-based activist Yodit Mesfin Johnson to present a series of events intended to celebrate "Black art, culture, and community."
 
Those events, which Mesfin Johnson curated, include a private brunch for Black women by Chef Nina Love, a family day, and a musical performance by the Detroit-based artist Supercoolwicked.
 
"The goal of these events is to center Black women … as well as a broader history and energy towards supporting the role that Blackness plays in many people's lives," neal says. "This is a celebratory moment."

Natalia Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and others.

Photo courtesy of UMMA.