For three decades, the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art has collected, archived and preserved art by and about women of the African diaspora. Its latest anniversary exhibition, “Between Here & Infinity: Celebrating 30 Years of the Spelman College Art Collection,” puts that mission on full display across both of the museum’s galleries for the first time.
“Between Here & Infinity” is organized into five atmospheric themes: the Root, the Threshold, the Interior, the Expanse and the Horizon. Dr. Chaunesti Webb-Johnson, the museum’s curator of collections, curated the exhibit, her first for Spelman. Its nearly 70 works, drawn from the collection’s earliest days through its most recent acquisitions, includes pieces by Elizabeth Catlett, Faith Ringgold, Emma Amos, Betye Saar, Zanele Muholi, Carrie Mae Weems and Kara Walker.
Webb-Johnson uses the five layers of Earth’s atmosphere as a metaphor for how vast and varied the Black feminist imagination is. The qualities of each layer shaped which works gather in each area. The Horizon takes its cue from the exosphere, the outermost layer, which dissolves into outer space. Here, she says, past and future collapse into one. New acquisitions hang alongside a timeline tracing a century of the arts at Spelman. Root is described as the ancestral ground the collection grows from, the Threshold as bodies and forms mid-transformation, the Interior as the collection’s quietest and most vulnerable works, and the Expanse as the imagination at full volume.
The show unfolded in two waves. The Horizon opened first, on Sept. 9, in the Bank of America Gallery at the Mary Schmidt Campbell Center for Innovation & the Arts. The Root, the Threshold, the Interior and the Expanse followed on Oct. 2 in the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby, Ed.D. Academic Center.
An afternoon of art
I spent an afternoon, a few days after the opening of the show’s second wave, walking through both galleries with Webb-Johnson and Dr. Liz Andrews, Executive Director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art. We began in the Bank of America Gallery, where the majority of featured works are by artists with ties to Atlanta.
“Helen McBride Richter … she comes between DC and Atlanta. Phyllis Stephens is out of Atlanta. Sheila Pree Bright … she is Atlanta. And then Kelly Taylor Mitchell is a professor right here at Spelman,” Andrews said. “The idea behind this building was that it’s the front porch to Spelman. It sits outside the gates, it’s supposed to invite in the public, and it faces the West End. So the idea that we’re looking back with artists who are grounded in Atlanta, I think is a beautiful thing.”
It’s here in the Bank of America Gallery, Andrews said, she’d start if she only had a quick moment to get a sense of what the Spelman collection holds.”I’d spend thirty minutes in here alone because it’s such a balance of history and very fresh artworks,” she said.
In that same gallery, Webb-Johnson shared how Spelman students played a role in developing the exhibition. A small cohort of student interns spent the summer with her, supporting the research, helping shape the show’s vision and creating a zine. The work, she says, gave them a stake in the exhibition and in the museum more broadly, along with a chance to learn alongside the art.
“This show in particular felt like a great opportunity to bring students even closer to the curatorial process, as we also have a curatorial studies minor here,” Webb-Johnson explained. “I really wanted to give students an opportunity to weigh in on what we were showing and what conversations we were staging within this exhibition.”
Works of note in ‘Between Here & Infinity’
“Between Here & Infinity” is breathtaking. Both in concept and execution. Several pieces stop you in your tracks, notably fiber artist Maren Hassinger’s “Love” (2008), a pyramid of “plastic bags, breath, love notes,” standing 32 feet high in a corner of the Cosby Gallery.
Nearby hang two bodies of work highlighted by Andrews and Webb-Johnson: “Groovin’ High,” a 1986 quilt by Faith Ringgold, and “Broomstick Ritual” a set of six lithographs by Aminah Robinson depicting the black matrimonial tradition of jumping the broom.
The side-by-side staging of the works is intentional. Ringgold’s scene of celebration reads as a reception, of sorts, to the wedding ceremony depicted in Robinson’s series . “The after-party,” Webb-Johnson said. Robinson’s storytelling also flips a familiar superstition: knocking the broom, often considered bad luck, becomes good luck.
The three works hang in the Expanse, the area aligned with the thermosphere, where the exhibition is “really playing with color,” Webb-Johnson said.
Another standout piece is Emma Amos’s tapestry “Hurdlers II” (1984). It hung in one of the Spelman Museum of Art’s first exhibitions, “Bearing Witness,” in 1996, the year Atlanta hosted the Olympics. The piece felt like a natural callback, for Webb-Johnson, to this year’s World Cup games.. It’s also part of a thread she traced through the collection while building the show: representations of play and recreation.
“You’ve got the fringe, so there’s a bit of movement there that calls back to the actual movement of the body moving across the hurdles,” Webb-Johnson said.
Why did a collection show now?
“Between Here & Infinity” grew out of a desire to showcase the Spelman Museum of Art’s permanent collection. The museum stages new exhibitions every semester, and incorporates pieces from the collection in each. Still, the last time the museum hosted a show dedicated to the collection itself, “Silver Linings: Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection,” was in 2021 to celebrate its 25th anniversary. Works included in that exhibition spent several years on a national tour, recently returning to campus.
“I want it to be possible for every student who comes through to be able to see a collection show,” Andrews said. “ And the timing was perfect because Dr. Webb Johnson started at the beginning of last year. And so leading up to the 30th, I think having a collection show and having a new lens on the collection was perfect.”
For Webb-Johnson, the payoff is already visible. At the public opening on Friday, she says, Spelman alumnae found pieces they remembered seeing as students.
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“They walk away feeling a sense of pride,” she said. “I think there’s so much cultural memory that’s held here, you know, in our museum.”
“Between Here & Infinity” is on view through Dec. 5, 2026. Admission is free. Learn more at spelman.edu
