Talladega College shares Hale Woodruff mural

Talladega College in Alabama has formed a partnership with three arts institutions to share six monumental artworks, a move that may shed light on how museums and institutions share the responsibility of preserving cultural heritage.

An alliance between the Historically Black College and the Toledo Museum of Art, Art Bridges and the Terra Foundation for American Art ensures that six murals by artist Hale A. Woodruff will remain on view to the public while supporting the long-term financial health of the college.

Painted between 1939 and 1942, Woodruff’s murals depict key moments in African American history: the Amistad Rebellion of 1839, the Underground Railroad and the founding of Talladega just after the Civil War. For decades, the works hung in the school’s Savery Library, rarely seen outside the university community. Beginning in 2012, the works were conserved and toured the United States as part of a traveling exhibition organized by the High Museum of Art before returning to campus in 2020.

Now, the Toledo Museum of Art has acquired underground railway (1942), which were jointly acquired by Art Bridges and the Terra Foundation amistad mural. The remaining two murals——Talladega College Open House and savery library building——will stay in school. Under the terms of the agreement, all six will be reunited on campus regularly, ensuring their continued connection with the institution that entrusted them.

For Talladega, this partnership was a given. The small liberal arts college, whose endowment hovers below $5 million, faces a financial crisis in 2024 severe enough to threaten payroll. “We have to look at every asset we own,” board chairwoman Rica Lewis-Payton told the Wall Street Journal. new york times earlier this week. Rather than simply selling off its most prized treasure, the college sought a solution that would meet its immediate needs without severing ties to the mural or Woodruff’s legacy.

“This was never a deal,” said Adam M. Levine, director and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art. art news in an interview this week. “It’s about a relationship. We asked how we can be the best partner to an agency trying to achieve multiple goals. Once we clarified that, the structure fell into place.”

Levine called the partnership “mutually beneficial,” not only because it provides stability for the college but also because it provides the mural with a broader audience. underground railway“This is particularly resonant for Toledo, the city that was the last stop on the Underground Railroad for enslaved people escaping to Canada via the Great Lakes to seek freedom,” he said. The painting will be on permanent display at the museum, with community events planned in Ohio and Talladega to deepen engagement with the work.

The cooperative model adopted by Talladega College — dividing ownership while retaining collective management — is part of a growing trend in the museum field. In 2021, the Dia Art Foundation and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston jointly acquired the work of Sam Gilliam double merge (1968), while the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Vincent Price Museum of Art jointly hold 21 photographs by the late photographer Laura Aguilar. Last year, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and two other Los Angeles museums (the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art) announced that they would share more than 350 works donated by collectors Jarl Mohn and Pamela Mohn and continue to add to their collections.

But the ongoing involvement of Talladega, the mural’s longtime administrator, is what sets this model apart from other recent models. in phone interview art newsNina del Rio, a consultant who helped design Talladega’s ownership structure, called it a way to share, “It’s realistic and sustainable. When we started, we asked the academy what goals it wanted to achieve. The answer was clear: Make the mural accessible, enhance Talladega’s profile, and secure its future. Those goals have to exist alongside each other.”

Del Rio and her team at del Rio | Byers initially explored selling all six murals together to a public institution, but few museums had the scale or co-management rights Talladega needed. “Some partners want to buy directly,” she said. “But it required collaboration. It took us a year of careful planning to find an agency that could share the responsibility permanently.”

For Del Rio, this outcome represents an “alternative solution” to the “all-or-nothing” logic of selling. “These paintings are in the public domain, Talladega’s story continues to be told, and the Academy is given the means to thrive,” she said.

Woodruff’s mural was commissioned by Talladega President Buell G. Gallagher and Board of Trustees Chairman George W. Crawford and was conceived in the same spirit of interracial cooperation that marked the college’s founding in 1867. Gallagher envisioned the new Savery Library, built by black and white laborers, as a monument to “intellectual progress and harmony.” Woodruff, who had recently concluded a collaboration with Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, was attracted to the project’s social idealism.

The resulting work is rhythmic, colorful, and narratively rich, and is one of the most important American murals of the 20th century. With its broad diagonal lines and muscular body, Amistad’s RebellionFor example, it is a monument to resistance and freedom. underground railway Transform historical fragments into fables of unity across race and geography.

This collaborative spirit will continue in new partnerships, with Mural reuniting approximately every six to twelve years. “One of the reasons Talladega repaints its murals every few years,” Levine said, “is not just for the students, but to create a moment that draws people to campus, increases the visibility of the university, and contributes to the local economy.”

For Talladega, the agreement is both a lifeline and a statement of intent. “The result of more than a year of careful consideration and due diligence, Talladega College benefits in an extraordinary way and honors those who came before it, including Hale Woodruff, whose paintings will now be seen by millions in the United States and around the world,” Lewis-Paton said in a statement.

The lessons Levine sees in this collaboration extend far beyond this case. “We often get bogged down in telling stories as if there are binaries,” he said. “But there are always hybrid solutions that can lead to better outcomes. The more we tell these stories, the more we can expand our view of what’s possible.”