Current Clark Atlanta exhibition is ‘a love letter’ to America’s HBCUs

On paper, it looked like a harmless move.

In October 2025, Talladega College entered into a partnership with Art Bridges Foundation and Terra Foundation for American Art to acquire three large-scale murals depicting the Amistad mutiny and its aftermath.

The pieces by artist Hale A. Woodruff were originally commissioned by Talladega and had been with the college’s Slavery Library for 70 years. The acquisition was said to bring Woodruff’s work to more audiences nationwide. The Amistad series would travel throughout the country, but would no longer call Talladega its permanent home.

Two years prior, in response to economic challenges that grew during the COVID-19 pandemic, Talladega’s board of trustees looked for solutions to their financial woes. Though the agreement offered much-needed funds and put a crucial piece of Black history in front of more audiences, Danille Taylor couldn’t help but feel a way about it.

“The institution may find themselves running into financial distress and they start to think of the art as an asset to get you out of operational distress,” said Taylor, the director at Clark Atlanta University Art Museum.

Taylor would’ve liked to see the Amistad series end up with another HBCU or Black museum.

“That’s a very complicated fraught issue, but it hurts.”

To counter that narrative, CAU, along with four other HBCUs, is part of an arts project highlighted by a traveling exhibition aimed at showcasing and preserving Black history.

“At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs,” is collaboration with Washington D.C.’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.

As part of a Smithsonian initiative focused on expanding access to HBCU collections, CAU, Tuskegee University, Florida A&M University, Jackson State University, and Texas Southern University are included in that collective.

CAU is the first of five HBCUs to host the traveling exhibition, which runs through Dec. 11 in Atlanta.

Through art, artifacts and archives, each institution offers different perspectives from their respective histories. Together, the hope is that students, faculty, alumni and surrounding communities see how HBCUs tell the story of not just Black, but American history. In a country where educators find Black history curriculums fading or under attack, exhibitions like “At the Vanguard” are crucial to keeping those stories alive.

Even with the recent success of the “A Different World” sequel on Netflix, what museums like CAU’s and this nationwide exhibition can do that pop culture can’t is offer an HBCU experience you can literally feel.

“TV shows are great. All of those things are great, but I can show you the tangibles,” Taylor said.

Let’s talk about those “tangibles.”

Included in the extensive exhibition are two typewriters that were crucial to telling Black stories.

One belonged to scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois.

The other belonged to poet and novelist Margaret Walker, who was also on Jackson State University’s faculty.

While at then-Atlanta University, Du Bois used his L C Smith & Corona to type out data compiled on the everyday lives of Black folks after slavery. Work that would be presented at the 1900 Paris Exposition. Essays that would later comprise Du Bois’s milestone, “The Souls of Black Folk,” were written with it. It’s also exclusive to CAU’s part in the larger exhibition.

Walker’s electronic IBM typewriter is what she used to write her essays.

Two machines separated by time and technological advancements, but used for the same purpose, which can serve as this exhibition’s overarching theme. “Getting the word out and preserving it, it’s important,” Taylor said.

“At the Vanguard” was an idea from the HBCU History and Culture Access Consortium that started five years ago. Other highlights include rare video footage from Tuskegee University of George Washington Carver experimenting with flowers in 1937. There’s also a rural landscape painting from artist and Tuskegee airman Clarence Laudric Shivers.

Murals from Woodruff, John Biggers — who founded Texas Southern’s art department — and CAU’s Radcliffe Bailey collection are also included. There are also works from up-and-coming artists that came through HBCUs.

Viewers can also peruse photography, literature, notebooks and other rarities that tell stories of the Black experience in America and how HBCUs were implicit in shaping it. “It’s a love letter to the mission and vision of HBCUs,” said Shyheim Williams, the museum’s digital humanities program manager.

If anyone knows the wealth of knowledge HBCU museums posses, it’s Williams, a Morehouse College and Winston-Salem State University alum. With “At the Vanguard,” Williams was tasked with image-capturing, metadata generation, and making objects accessible via a digital repository.

Williams studied speculative fiction, so to see works from Afrofuturist author and CAU alumna, Ytasha Womack, it’s examples like this one that speak to the breadth of items included.

“What this exhibition does and what the work that we do continues to do is push back against these rhetorics of single stories that we haven’t done anything,” he said.

The CAU team knows its an uphill battle worth fighting. Seeing government and predominantly white institutions question the value of Black studies is real. It’s fact that is not lost on Clarke Brown, special projects curator at the museum.

“As we continue to push back against a lot of the things that this current administration is doing and this point of erasure, we have to continue to advocate for ourselves and the contributions that we have made throughout history and to this country,” said Brown, a Spelman alumna, who researches and develops exhibitions and programming at the museum.

On Dec. 5, the museum will host “Infinite Pasts and Ancestral Futures: The Murals of Hale Woodruff and John Biggers,” as part of continued programming tied this exhibition. Brown will join Texas Southern University art director and historian Alvia Wardlaw in conversation.

All participating HBCUs in “At the Vanguard” have catalogs highlighting their contributions, but a book exclusive to CAU will likely drop in 2028, Brown said.

Both Brown and Williams credit Taylor’s leadership with encouraging them to be stewards of promoting and preserving Black history.

Taylor feels like its incumbent on her generation and the ones that follow to connect communities with overlooked elements of Black culture. “That’s why I’m worried about it being siphoned away,” she said.

“We have to be very careful on that, even almost proprietary over it. Don’t just let stuff go.”

IF YOU GO

“At the Vanguard: Making and Saving History at HBCUs”

Through Dec. 11. 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Tues.-Fri., Saturday hours vary. Free. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. Trevor Arnett Hall, 223 James P Brawley Dr. SW Second, Atlanta. 404 880-6102.

“Infinite Pasts and Ancestral Futures: The Murals of Hale Woodruff and John Biggers”