To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities is a special exhibition showcasing over 200 artworks from six historically black college art collections. The exhibition features paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The colleges and universities that have contributed works and input in the project are the following: North Carolina Central University (NCCU), Howard University, Tuskegee Institute, Clark Atlanta University, Hampton University, and Fisk University.

The exhibition is co-organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem and the participating historically black college consortium partners. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Richard J. Powell, professor and Chair of the Department of Art and Art History at Duke University and Jock Reynolds, former Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art and Director of the Yale University Art Gallery.

In addition to curatorial responsibilities, both curators contributed major essays to the accompanying exhibition catalogue. The catalogue is fully-illustrated and includes color reproductions of over 100 works ("before-and-after" images), descriptions of conservation methods and biographical data on each artist. The catalogue is distributed by MIT Press.

The conservation efforts for this project, overseen by the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, have been extensive, including the restoration of over 1,400 works. The conservation training program targeted minority students in order to draw new and diverse talent into the field of museum preservation. Julian Weaver, a junior art major at NCCU, was among the students chosen to intern in the conservation of works for both NCCU's collection as well as that of other historically black colleges.

The Durham showing of To Conserve a Legacy will be broken down in to three venues, each exploring themes central to the overall history, legacy and preservation efforts emphasized in the project. In addition to the NCCU Art Museum, both Duke University Art Museum and the Center for Documentary Studies will highlight specific themes and offer special programs and events connected to the works on tour. NCCU will showcase the portion of the exhibition entitled," Forever Free: Emancipation Visualized," a sampling of works from the late nineteenth century such as Henry O. Tanner's "Poplars." In addition NCCU Art Museum will show works which examine the relationship between Native Americans and African Americans in a section called, "The First Americans." The Durham exhibition schedule runs from October 15, 2000 through December 3, 2000. The actual tour will end July 2001.

The exhibition tour as well as the coinciding conservation efforts have been made possible by the generous support of our corporate sponsors, AT&T and Ford Motor Company. Among the other funding institutions to support To Conserve a Legacy are the Henry Luce Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the LEF Foundation, the Greentree Foundation, the Joseph Harrison Jackson Foundation, and the Trellis Fund. The Durham showing is supported by the Lyndhurst Foundation and the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation.