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Hampton University Museum

Reginald Lewis Museum in Baltimore

Black Museums Gain In Popularity Across Nation

By Rosaland Tyler

Associate Editor

New Journal and Guide

    As the museum at Hampton University is made ready for Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority’s 100th birthday celebration which will include an exhibit that will open April 6, more communities nationwide are building African-American museums.
In Philadelphia, Pesco Energy Co. recently donated $500,000 to the African American Museum. In Boston, Wal Mart recently donated $250,000 to restore meeting rooms inside of the Museum of African American History, where abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas met. Meanwhile, in Frankfort, Ky., a $20,000 state grant will be used (in part) to locate and preserve the burial site of a black regiment that was killed during the Civil War.
   “I love it,” Wachovia official Bob Bertges said, in Charlotte. That’s where a new African American Arts and Culture center is being built in Brooklyn, a once fashionable black neighborhood urban renewal consumed.
    The $18.6 million building, which is rising out of the ground near the six-building-Wachovia-cultural-campus in uptown Charlotte, will be a glass-and-metal structure, which architects say was inspired by African quilt-making and local history.
    Scheduled to open in late summer 2009, the U-shaped, four-story center in Charlotte will resemble a Jacob’s ladder. Stairs, escalators and elevators on the first floor will lead up to the second floor lobby, which will run toward exhibits and performances in the arts and culture center.

     “I honestly think it is one of the most dramatic buildings” in the cultural campus, said Bertges, who is Wachovia’s director of corporate real estate.
    Like Jacob’s ladder, the point is to go higher and higher in the new building. It is “going to help elevate the center from that small little church on the outskirts of Charlotte to an incredible edifice in the heart of Charlotte,” said Deon Bradley, president of the Afro-Am designers, whose company is working with the center.

   In Hampton Roads, however, a trip to an African American museum comes without blueprints, flying dust, noisy hammers, or nails. At nearby Hampton University Museum, which was established in 1868, there is a 9,500-piece collection which includes African art, and fine art from all over the world.

Posted March 20, 2008

      
    “The museum is one of the best kept secrets,” said Vanessa Thaxton-Ward, curator of collections at the museum.    “We are the oldest museum in Virginia-period. We have one of the largest collections of African-American fine art.”
Vernon S. Courtney, HU’s museum director since April 2007, was recently elected president of the Association of African American Museums. He was formerly the director of the National African American Museum and Cultural Center in Wilberforce, Ohio.   “I hope over the next three years to significantly increase membership” in the AAAM, Courtney said, on the museum’s website. “I also want to strengthen professional services provided by the organization to its members and member museums.”
    But getting a museum up and running is only part of what it takes. Continued interest counts, especially, in the nation’s capital where the Smithsonian is in phase one of designing a national African American museum.
Freelon Bond has been chosen by the Smithsonian’s national Museum of African American History and Culture to conduct an 18-month study to determine what the new building will need.
   “The study is scheduled to be completed by Jan. 31, 2009 and will outline the full spectrum of requirements for the new building,” according to an AAAM press release.
“The museum is expected to open its doors to the public in 2015. It will be erected on a five-acre tract of land on the National Mall known as the Monument site. The site is adjacent to the Washington Monument and across the street from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American history.”
The builders, Davis Brody Bond and The Freelon Group, have built several African-themed museums. They built the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama; the Martin Luther King Center in Atlanta, and the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American history and Culture in Baltimore.

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