Spelman College Museum of Fine Art

This guide to the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta centers on the four people who run the only museum in the country devoted to art by and about women of the African diaspora. It traces the collection's slow gathering since the 1930s to a single home in 1996, spurred by incoming president Johnnetta Betsch Cole, and opened with a show called Bearing Witness. Director Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, who led the museum from 2001 to 2020, championed artists like Amy Sherald and Zanele Muholi years before the wider art world caught on.