Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman

For many years, Renée Stout has used her alter ego Fatima Mayfield, a fictitious herbalist/fortuneteller, as a vehicle to role-play and confront issues such as romantic relationships, social ills, or financial woes in a way that is open, creative and humorous. Renée Stout: Tales of the Conjure Woman brings together painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, glassblowing, installation, and […]

Posing Beauty
in African American Culture

The Museum’s presentation of Posing Beauty in African American Culture featured more than seventy-five photographs by leading, emerging, and amateur photographers. It explored the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been informed by photographers and artists working from 1890 to the present. The exhibition incorporated a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, […]

Multiple Choice:
Perspectives on the Spelman College Collection

The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art invited students, faculty, staff, Friends of the Museum, alumnae, and other stakeholders to help select the objects featured in the exhibition Multiple Choice: Perspectives on the Spelman College Collection. This project allowed fifty participants to select, engage, and discuss specific works from the College’s permanent collection. They were then asked […]

Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists

Material Girls: Contemporary Black Women Artists (September 6 – December 1, 2012) featured works by Chakaia Booker, Sonya Clark, Maya Freelon Asante, Maren Hassinger, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Joyce J. Scott, and Renée Stout. Each of the seven artists incorporate a range of materials including hair, beads, tissue paper, volcanic stone, rubber tires, and plastic into their […]

American People, Black Light: Faith Ringgold’s Paintings of the 1960s

Faith Ringgold (b. 1930) is well-known as the progenitor of the African American story quilt revival that began in the late 1970s. In the 1960s, however, she found her political voice and discovered artistic methods to express it by painting two important series, American People and Black Light. Both series inform works she has created throughout her career […]

15 x 15 : The 15th Anniversary Acquisitions Exhibition

When the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art was established in 1996, it became the repository for the art collection that Spelman College had amassed over several decades. Over the last fifteen years, the Museum has safeguarded the permanent collection and honed its unique mission to emphasize art by and about women of the African […]