Spelman College is a private, historically Black, women's liberal arts college in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. The college is part of the Atlanta University Center academic consortium in Atlanta. Founded in 1881 as the Atlanta Baptist Female Seminary, Spelman received its collegiate charter in 1924, making it America's oldest private historically black liberal arts college for women.
Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art.
Beverly Buchanan was an African-American artist whose works include painting, sculpture, video, and land art. Buchanan is noted for her exploration of Southern vernacular architecture through her art.
David C. Driskell was an American artist, scholar and curator; recognized for his work in establishing African-American Art as a distinct field of study. In his lifetime, Driskell was cited as one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject of African-American Art. Driskell held the title of Distinguished University Professor of Art, Emeritus, at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Mary Schmidt Campbell, is an American academic administrator and museum curator. She began her tenure as the 10th president of Spelman College on August 1, 2015. Prior to this position, Schmidt Campbell held several positions in New York City's cultural sector.
Renee Stout is an American sculptor and contemporary artist known for assemblage artworks dealing with her personal history and African-American heritage. Born in Kansas, raised in Pittsburgh, living in Washington, D.C., and strongly connected through her art to New Orleans, Stout has strong ties to multiple parts of the United States. Her art reflects this, with thematic interest in African diasporic culture throughout the United States. Stout was the first American artist to exhibit in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art.
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
Louis J. Delsarte was an African-American artist known for what has sometimes been called his "illusionistic" style. He was a painter, muralist, printmaker, and illustrator.
Camille Olivia Cosby is an American television producer, philanthropist, and the wife of comedian Bill Cosby. The character of Clair Huxtable from The Cosby Show was based on her. Cosby has avoided public life, but has been active in her husband's businesses as a manager, as well as involving herself in academia and writing. In 1990, Cosby earned a master's degree from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, followed by a Ph.D. in 1992.
Linda Goode Bryant is an African American documentary filmmaker and activist. She founded the gallery Just Above Midtown (JAM), which will be the focus of an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 2022 organized by curator Thomas Lax.
Amalia K. Amaki is an African-American artist, art historian, educator, film critic and curator who recently resided in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa from 2007 to 2012.
Varnette Patricia Honeywood was an American painter, writer, and businesswoman whose paintings and collages depicting African-American life hung on walls in interior settings for The Cosby Show after Camille and Bill Cosby had seen her art and started collecting some of her works. Her paintings also appeared on television on the Cosby Show spin-off A Different World, as well as on the TV series Amen and 227.
Located at 1315 Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, "MODA is the only museum in the Southeast devoted exclusively to the study and celebration of all things design."
Tamara Natalie Madden was a Jamaican-born painter and mixed-media artist working and living in the United States. Madden's paintings are allegories whose subjects are the people of the African diaspora.
Betty Blayton was an American activist, advocate, artist, arts administrator and educator, and lecturer. As an artist, Blayton was an illustrator, painter, printmaker, and sculptor. She is best known for her works often described as "spiritual abstractions". Blayton was a founding member of the Studio Museum in Harlem and board secretary, co-founder and executive director of Harlem Children's Art Carnival (CAC), and a co-founder of Harlem Textile Works. She was also an advisor, consultant and board member to a variety of other arts and community-based service organizations and programs. Her abstract methods created a space for the viewer to insert themselves into the piece, allowing for self reflection, a central aspect of Blayton's work.
Camille Josephine Billops was an African-American sculptor, filmmaker, archivist, printmaker, and educator.
Lisa Farrington is an American art historian, specializing in African-American art, Haitian art, and women's art. She is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Art and Music at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Farrington is one of the major scholars of Faith Ringgold, is the author of several books on African-American art, and is one of only six full professors of African-American art history in the United States.
Andrea Barnwell Brownlee is an American art curator and author. She is the current CEO of the Cummer Museum. She is the former director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. Her work has historically focused on the promotion of female African-American artists. She has published four books on artists and film.
Fabiola Jean-Louis is a Haitian artist working in photography, paper textile design, and sculpture. Her work examines the intersectionality of the Black experience, particularly that of women, to address the absence and imbalance of historical representation of African American and Afro-Caribbean people. Jean-Louis has earned residencies at the Museum of Art and Design (MAD), New York City, the Lux Art Institute, San Diego, and the Andrew Freedman Home in The Bronx. Fabiola lives and works in New York City.
The Thankful Poor is an 1894 genre painting by the African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner. It depicts two African Americans praying at a table, and shares common themes with Tanner's other paintings from the 1890s including The Banjo Lesson (1893) and The Young Sabot Maker (1895). The work is based on photographs Tanner had taken, and is influenced by his views on education and race, which were in turn derived from those of his father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The painting is considered a milestone in African-American art, notably for its countering of racial stereotypes.
