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.
Opening Reception May 7, 2026, 6-9PM
Across time and geography, wherever systems of domination have existed, they have been met with resistance. Those subjected to oppression have never accepted their condition in silence; rather, they have asserted their agency through organized uprisings, collective struggle, and quiet acts of defiance. The historical record affirms that rebellion, resistance, and revolution are not disruptions of the human story but essential forces within it, expressions of a universal impulse toward freedom and self-determination, affirming humanity’s collective demand for freedom as an inalienable right.
This exhibition is part of Framing American Democracy, a series of exhibitions throughout The Wadsworth that mark the American Semiquincentennial in 2026.
This exhibition is supported by The Roberts Foundation for the Arts and The State of Connecticut.
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.
© 2026 The Amistad Center for Art & Culture at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.
