At the Auburn Avenue Research Library, a new photography exhibit is telling the story of the life of Kathleen Cleaver. “The World(s) She Made: Composing the Radical Lives of Kathleen Neal Cleaver,” opened July 30 and runs through Jan. 4, 2027. It’s billed as the first public photography exhibit to explore the entire arc of Cleaver’s story, from a childhood as the daughter of a U.S. Foreign Service officer, through her years as a leader in the Black Power movement, to her decades as a legal scholar, professor, mother and grandmother.
Atlanta shaped Cleaver’s activism early. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent her from New York to its Atlanta office in 1967. In recent years, she’s made the city home. The show’s Auburn Avenue Research Library location holds its own place in Cleaver’s story. The former SNCC Atlanta office sits down the street
A three-year project
“The World(s) She Made” draws from a personal collection Cleaver spent decades building. Thousands of images, including family photographs from her years in exile in Algeria and France, with husband Eldridge Cleaver plus work by Gordon Parks and Doris Derby, among other notable photographers.
The project began in Cleaver’s home, where she and former Emory student Stephanie Alvarado started organizing the collection before reaching out in 2016 to Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley and a scholar of social movement photography. Cleaver later recruited photographer John Stephens to join the team at a Gordon Parks Foundation event in New York. Stephens brought in his niece, photographer-archivist Sierra King, while Raiford added Delphine Sims, then a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art program at UC Berkeley, and Lia T. Bascomb, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Georgia State University.
Over three years, the team worked inside Cleaver’s home, protecting thousands of photographs and formally cataloging nearly 1,000, with descriptions drawn largely from Cleaver’s own stories. Selecting which photographs to include in the exhibit took more than a year, curators say.
What made the final cut was a collective call, decided through weekly meetings and curatorial retreats. Some images, curators said, felt “too intimate for a public exhibition” and were left for visitors willing to seek out the full archive at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, now home to the complete Kathleen Cleaver Papers.
Cleaver’s own POV
The exhibit opens with a digitized photo album Cleaver first assembled in the 1980s and kept revising for years — adding captions, swapping photos in and out. Curators used it as a guide for the rest of the show. An installation featuring a zebra-print chair, photo albums and books recreates the feel of Cleaver’s own home, meant as a place where visitors can sit, read and reflect.
“The World(s) She Made” moves chronologically, from a section titled “Before She Was an Icon” through “Atlanta is Home but Human Rights Activism is Global.” The throughline, curators say, is the “perseverance and preservation” of Cleaver.
Beyond the icon
What curators hope visitors take away most, they say, is a fuller sense of the person behind the image: someone who saw photography as both an art form and a tool for Black people to document their own lives and stories. They want visitors to value Cleaver’s choices as a mother, grandmother, mentor and friend as revolutionary in their own right, and to notice the exhibit makes room for rest, vacationing, joy as part of that part of her story.
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The show is also meant to deepen the historical record of Black women’s roles within the Black Panther Party and the broader Black Power movement. Curators see Cleaver’s example, in their words, as one “to live with and learn from in our own contemporary moment.”
The exhibition was supported in part by the Terra Foundation for American Art, and is co-curated by a team assembled by Cleaver in agreement with Emory’s Rose Library, including: Stephanie Alvarado, Lia T. Bascomb, Sierra King, Leigh Raiford, Delphine Sims and John Stephens.
“The World(s) She Made: Composing the Radical Lives of Kathleen Neal Cleaver” runs through Jan. 4, 2027 at the Auburn Avenue Research Library.
