​​Amistad II​, David Driskell’s Curatorial Oeuvre, and the Artistic Legacy of the American Missionary Association of New York

The AMA was a racially integrated nineteenth-century antislavery and anti-caste society. Its origin is deeply rooted in the ​Amistad​ incident of 1839. The purpose of this American art partnership is to examine the AMA’s role as an integrated organization working for the advancement of race relations in the American South, with a specific focus on the visual arts holdings of its institutions. Consequently, the AMA’s institutional legacies in the form of integrated academies established after the American Civil War are explored in relation to the careers of David C. Driskell (1931–2020), Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000), and other significant American artists. With the assistance of the Harmon Foundation and the art critic Dore Ashton (1928–2017), these AMA institutions became repositories of important American art collections and manuscripts.

​​As mentioned, the AMA’s origin story is inextricably linked to the Amistad incident. Portuguese human traffickers abducted a large group of Africans from Mendeland, in present-day Sierra Leone and shipped them to Havana, Cuba. This act violated all treaties then in existence. Two Spanish plantation owners, Pedro Montes and Jose Ruiz, captured fifty-three Africans and put them aboard the Cuban schooner​ La Amistad ​with the intent of shipping them to a plantation elsewhere in the Caribbean. On July 1, 1839, the Africans, led by Sengbe Pieh (also known as Joseph Cinqué), seized the ship, killed its captain and cook, and ordered Montes and Ruiz to sail back to Africa. Captured, tried, and acquitted in an American court, the kidnapped Africans were released and along with the supporters of their case went on to establish the AMA in the United States and missions in Africa. A memorialization of this globally significant incident was led by Buell G. Gallagher in 1938 on the campus of Talladega College, an AMA–supported academy in Alabama. Gallagher, the college’s president, commissioned the American artist Hale A. Woodruff (1900–1980) to depict the Amistad incident in three mural paintings on the walls of the college’s new library. Seen by students, faculty, and citizens of the town of Talladega, the murals were intended to be a statement of “interracial harmony and intellectual advancement.” The ​three mural paintings, ​The Mutiny on the Amistad​, The Trial of the Amistad Captives, ​​and​ ​Repatriation of the Freed Captives​ ​(1938–1939)​, remain ​on view on the campus in the Dr. William R. Harvey Museum of Art. ​​

​​The ​Terra Foundation’s inaugural launch of this initiative focuses on the American art collection at the Amistad Research Center (ARC), based in New Orleans, Louisiana. A three-year grant totaling $1 million to ARC is intended to support a collaborative research project that will preserve, interpret, and exhibit a series of original paintings at three participating institutions by Jacob Lawrence devoted to Toussaint L’Ouverture (1743–1803). The series chronicles events surrounding the Haitian Revolution (Révolution Haïtienne) of 1791 led by L’Ouverture. The second prong of this initiative supports a three-year programming and publication project totaling $280,000 to establish an institutional archive documenting the first twenty-five years of the David C. Driskell Center. The Center’s history and legacy as a leading institution for studying and presenting American art will be emphasized. The archive will also make accessible the papers of pioneering curator and arts administrator Terrie S. Rouse-Rosario. This initiative focuses on the AMA’s twentieth-century endeavors to use art for the ​​advancement of race​​ relations. Leveraging art in this way satisfies one of the foundation’s strategic goals of supporting local and global connections between institutions, contributing to their sustainability while elevating understanding of historic American art.​ ​

​​​Additionally, the Terra Foundation is thinking strategically about its art collection and acquisitions. In 2023 and 2024, the board of directors approved the acquisition of Gabriel, 1965, by David C. Driskell, and an untitled painting on canvas, 1960, by Alma W. Thomas (1891–1978). Together these paintings forge a path for the foundation’s new collection plan, which activates the collection by making it available worldwide through loans and exhibitions. These acquisitions establish a mile marker in the foundation’s journey toward contributing to conversations that reflect and broaden the range and complexity of American art.​​

​​​The foundation’s commitment to extending the collection beyond 1945 is also evident in these acquisitions that connect to the AMA. The acquisition of Driskell’s Gabriel is the foundation’s attempt to think deeply about Driskell as an essential American artist and scholar and to consider his ties to the AMA, having been a student and a professor at Howard University (founded by Oliver Otis Howard, 1830–1909, the head of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands and assisted by the privately supported AMA). Driskell began his academic teaching career at Talladega College. He then continued the artistic legacy that American artist Aaron Douglas (1899 –1979) built at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, an institution also historically supported by the AMA. Moreover, Driskell was an early supporter and champion of Alma Thomas, organizing Thomas’s first solo exhibition at Fisk and mounting a serious campaign to show her works at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet another connection is observed by the fact that Driskell’s position as inaugural curator of the fine art collection at the Amistad Research Center was underwritten by the AMA.​​

Driskell scholar Julie L. McGee is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Art History as well as Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware. Dr. McGee is a Tyson Scholar for American Art, focusing on David Driskell’s curatorial oeuvre. As an independent curator, she developed David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History (2021) in collaboration with the High Museum of Art and the Portland Museum of Art. Among her past accomplishments and fellowships are the Dorothy Kayser Hohenberg Chair of Excellence in Art History at the University of Memphis, a Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship at the Smithsonian. Dr. McGee’s extensive scholarship on Driskell also includes David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar (Pomegranate Communications, 2006).

In a recent article, Dr. McGee begins to chronicle Driskell’s curatorial legacy by highlighting his contribution to the exhibition Amistad II: Afro American Art in American Art, published by the University of Chicago Press in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Summer 2024, Volume 38, Number 2). McGee’s essay, “Amistad II: A Bicentennial Celebration for All,” examines Driskell’s impact on American art and underscores the significant influence of integrated environments fostered historically by AMA–supported institutions. Dr. McGee’s research confirms that these spaces were the first nurturing grounds and interracial epicenters for American artists, art practice, and experimentation.

Turry M. Flucker, Vice President of Collections and Partnerships, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Julie McGee, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Art History, Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center at the University of Delaware, and Tyson Scholar for American Art, engage in a conversation about Driskell, his work, and his legacy.

TMF: What inspired you to write about Amistad II? Why do you think Amistad II did not receive the same attention as Two Centuries?

JM: One of my “back burner” research projects related to David C. Driskell is a book on his career as a curator, and one who operated for many of his foundational years from predominantly Black spaces (Talladega, Howard, and Fisk). This matters for the formation of Two Centuries of Black American Art (LACMA, 1976), the exhibition for which he is best known. I have long argued that his training and professional development within the context of predominantly Black academies is too often ignored or underplayed in popular considerations of his career and Two Centuries of Black American Art. Fortunately, this perspective is evolving. We trace and interrogate the effects of Black curation on American art—but what was it like to curate from a place like Talladega or Fisk, for example?

My first book on Driskell, David C. Driskell: Artist and Scholar (2006), used an institutional framework as a scaffold. My current manuscript begins in Alabama with Talladega College (1955–1962), where Driskell had his first teaching position and where he started curating. The Amistad II research comes from the chapters on his decade at Fisk University in Nashville (1966–Dec. 1976). However, the research, writing, and thinking about Amistad II took over what I wanted to write about Driskell at Fisk. In many ways, Amistad II is both an exemplar of his Fisk years and an anomaly. In truth, Amistad II became an obsession with me, as I reached out to every venue that still exists today in search of archival information. I was deeply fascinated by the unique goals and thinking behind the project, and the vision and agency of the many engaged with its success. I needed to give it a separate airing because it went beyond Fisk, and because the project was equally imprinted by the UCC and the UCBHM (United Church and Board for Homeland Ministries), a later iteration of the AMA.

Moreover, Amistad II seemed especially relevant now. It also helped me reframe my thoughts about the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776. The United States’ semi-quincentennial will be celebrated on July 4, 2026, and many cultural institutions have planned to mark it for some years now. Something is unsettling about how we might engage the arts in an “America 250” acknowledgment, more so now than ever.

I expect there are many reasons Amistad II is not better remembered, among them the sheer ephemerality of it beyond the catalog and the art itself. The funding, structure, and staff were created for its production alone. Each venue had the installation for about a month or less. As a production that was to mark the Bicentennial, it belonged to no one and everyone at the same time. It did not have a museum behind it, like LACMA (for Two Centuries). On the visual art side, it was less than half the size of Two Centuries. Amistad II was not just an art exhibition—it was an ambitious tutorial on a host of subjects, art being but one of them.

While in the last decade much attention has been paid to the importance of HBCUs1 to American history and culture, this was not the case in the 1970s. One does not raise the profile of American consciousness about them with one ephemeral production that is said to celebrate the Bicentennial, let alone interracial cooperation. HBCUs should be supported and celebrated for their significance, collections, and educational legacy without other motives being the driving force.

TMF: Beyond Driskell’s work as a professor, curator, and artist, who was Driskell, and what legacy do you think he left?

JM: Driskell’s most important legacy, beyond what you point to, is that of a mentor—to students and many others who were informal students of his, including me. His mentorship has inspired and shaped countless people engaged in “American” art. He is undoubtedly an inspirational artist, historian, curator, and philosopher. As a scholar, I am indebted to his foresight to document and archive—to create a record for history. He valued the historical record as a lens for understanding. Driskell was deeply wedded to the notion that art tied us to being human and just as equally to the spiritual. He believed artists are visionaries.