By the time Atlanta’s Spelman College Museum of Fine Art first opened its doors in 1996, the school had been collecting art objects for decades. The first were African sculptures donated by educator and missionary Nora A. Gordon around 1900. In 1935, the school made its first real art acquisition, a set of linocuts by the influential African American muralist (and Spelman art teacher) Hale Woodruff. Black artists have always been the focus of the college’s collection, but it wasn’t until the early 1980s that Spelman began to prioritize acquiring works specifically by Black women artists—an important, if belated, shift given that Spelman was founded in 1881 as Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary and is today the country’s oldest private liberal arts school for Black women. The College Museum is the only one in the U.S. “dedicated to art by and about women of the African diaspora,” according to its website. The traveling exhibition “Silver Linings: Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection” arrived at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in August. Most of the artists included in the show are women, all but a few are American, and their approaches range from the vernacular to the conceptual—offering a varied and stimulating overview of the college’s collection and of Black art of the last century-plus.

        The UMMA version of “Silver Linings” starts off with work by an artist with a local connection, Beverly Buchanan—a Southern creative who spent time in Ann Arbor late in her life. Buchanan studied under Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden in New York, but it was the vernacular architecture of her South Carolina youth that inspired her evocative, cobbled-together sculptures—tiny models of sharecroppers’ shacks and homesteads, built from found materials that echo the character of the original structures. Buchanan’s bold, vivid drawings of these buildings share a directness of style with a nearby marker-and-pastel drawing by Georgian artist Nellie Mae Rowe, in which a woman in a fancy dress and hat addresses a fantastical blue bird—one of the “things you haven’t seen born into this world” that the visionary artist loved to depict.

        The two bronze sculptures on display here present sharply contrasting emotional states. One is by artist, educator, and nurse Selma Burke, whose portrait relief of Franklin Roosevelt was the basis for the one that appears on the U.S. dime. Sadness (1970) depicts a nude figure slumped into a mournful pyramid. Her face is hidden, and her heavy, outsized hands and feet emphasize the gravity of her sorrow. On the other side of the gallery is Standing Woman (Woman Walking) (1987), a vision of confidence and determination by expatriate revolutionary Elizabeth Catlett. Her sculpture is as solid as Burke’s but is upright, striding forward into the breeze that rustles her dress, one hand sweeping back her hair, the other held behind her at hip level, clenched in a fist.

        On the wall nearby is a photograph of another standing woman, a self-portrait by Renee Cox, in which the artist appears nude but for a set of large false breasts and buttocks, “comic” props purchased from a costume shop. Entitled Hot-en-Tot (1994), Cox’s photo evokes nineteenth-century engravings of Sara Baartman, the enslaved woman dubbed the “Hottentot Venus” who was paraded around Europe in an attempt to justify bogus theories of “scientific racism.” Cox looks out from her photo at the viewer, disrupting any objectifying gaze and granting Baartman what Cox calls a “triumphant moment” of agency she was denied in life. In a similar vein, Character Recognition (2004-07), two nineteenth-century-style ambrotype self-portraits by Spelman art professor Myra Green, quote and comment on ethnographic images of Black subjects.

        Next to Hot-en-Tot is a photographic diptych—a pair of self-portraits, one the flipped reverse of the other—by Carrie Mae Weems entitled I Looked and Looked and Failed to See What So Frightened You (2004). Weems’ pose is similar to that of Catlett’s sculpture. She stands in the center of each image in a quilted dress, one hand raised to the side of her head, but holding a small mirror in the other. To quote a wall plaque for another of her works in the gallery, Weems is “both subject and object, performer and director” of this diptych; depicting herself looking into a mirror—then mirroring that image—creates a web of gazes within gazes that suggests the complexity of forming and projecting one’s identity. Elsewhere, Lorna Simpson addresses identity with her piece Details (1996), a group of several tightly-cropped fragments of vintage photos, each paired with brief, cryptic captions, creating mysterious narratives that offer more questions than answers about their anonymous subjects.

        Other works by women artists here include a tender lithograph by art historian and “the ‘godmother’ of African American art” Samella Lewis of a Mother and Son, both of whom seem to have much on their minds; a beautifully monstrous portrait by Firelei Báez, Of Love Possessed, featuring a head covered in flowers and fur; abstract paintings by Betty Blayton and Lucille Malkia Roberts; and a wonderful scene of a crowd of jazz dancers painted onto a quilt by Faith Ringgold; plus works by Emma Gold, Howardena Pindell, Deborah Roberts, Amalia Amaki, Jamaican sculptor Edna Manley, and U.K. mixed media artist Lina Iris Viktor.

        A number of male artists in the Spelman collection are represented here as well. Henry Ossawa Tanner’s luminous Biblical scene Christ and His Disciples Before the Last Supper (1908-09) is the oldest artwork in the show. Three joyful and colorful mixed media works by Benny Andrews contrast both with the moody, muscular figurative drawings of Herman Kofi Bailey and a graphite portrait of abolitionist John Brown by Charles White. Two abstract paintings by Woodruff and a collage by Bearden are included, as well as works by Sam Gilliam and Glenn Ligon. And Floyd Coleman’s Growing Up Black, an expressionistic image of what seems to be a rather alert-looking child vigorously painted in black, white, and sepia accented with bright orange and muted green, is one of the most striking paintings here.

        The “silver lining” of the show’s title is the one that radiates through the dark clouds of racism that have hung over the U.S. since its inception. In spite of the gloom, Black artists have created, in the words of curator julia elizabeth neal, “a vibrant, enduring arc of innovation and achievement” that shines brightly through the varied works in this show. The next stop for “Silver Linings will be the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida, beginning February 4 of 2025.

Sean Bieri, a cartoonist and graphic designer, has written on art for the Detroit Metro Times, Wayne State University, and the Erb Family Foundation among other outlets. He received both his BFA and a BA in Art History—28 years apart—from Wayne State. He is a founding member of Hatch, an arts collective based in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, where he lives. He is currently assisting Hatch in the renovation of the “Hamtramck Disneyland” folk art site.