We Animate Collections and Exhibitions.
Our innovative exhibitions highlights artifacts, art objects and ephemera from our collection. Exhibitions often feature loans from African American collectors and HBCU collections, celebrating their rich cultural heritage. We offer school tours, virtual experiences, and engaging programs like workshops lectures to inspire and educate all audiences.
The exhibition, Yoruba World looks at traditional sculpture and masquerade traditions of the Yoruba culture of Nigeria and it’s influence on the formation of Yoruba Atlantic religions and the visual iconography of the arts of the African Diaspora. The exhibition features selected works from the Amistad Center’s collection. As well as traditional Yoruba material culture and works by contemporary Diaspora artists that reflect on the diffusion and vitality of Yoruba culture. Programming will focus on explorations of Yoruba influence and identity in the Americas with a special focus on the Brazilian, Cuban, Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Jamaican descendant communities of the Greater Hartford region.
Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is the culmination of a multiyear journey by photographer Wendel A. White to find and document African American material culture in the libraries, museums, and archives of the thirteen original English colonies and Washington, DC. This “personal reliquary of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections” includes both singular objects connected to significant figures (a lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair, Malcolm X’s tape recorder) and more quotidian materials (a hair straightening comb, a pressed corsage). Given the same photographic treatment—each object centered on a stark black background and captured with a shallow depth of field—the distinction between the “significant” and the “quotidian” dissolves, as White makes it clear they are all important pieces of forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States.
© 2025 The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
