Clark Atlanta University Fall '25 Exhibition Season

Ancestral Mirrors is a visual ritual- a speculative altar constructed from memory, lineage, and metaphysical presence. It is a world built from the shimmer of (re)memory, the weight of inherited objects, and the sacred act of stitching the past into the present.Drawing from her familial archives, Shanequa Gay conjures memory, mythology, multidimensional time, and ancestral lineage while blending Yoruba symbology and her indigenous heritage. Gay’s creates collage, textile textures, sculpture, and cosmic overlays that merge themes of her experiences in the American South, Black women epistemologies, erasure of the Lightning neighborhood, andher relationship to sacred sites such as Morris Brown College. Indigo represents a portal towards corporeal discourse and a mirror toreflect Gay’s ancestral layers. Spiritually indigo represents wisdom, insight, and connection to the unseen. It’s also associated with West African cultural rituals and evokes the cosmos, water, and memory, offering a fluid dimension where the personal and the ancestral intermingle. This portal represents a space where the living and the ancestral meet, where the visible and speculative collapse into one image. Ancestral Mirrors is a mapping of the unseen. A collapse of the veil. It is the sacred act of looking back in order tomove forward, of standing in the now while reaching across time to touch the hand of an ancestor. This exhibition embodies ancestral voices, sacred rites, matrilineal care, Black femininity, our connection to the divine, and counter-narratives, that explore how we are shaped by both personal histories and collective cultural legacies passed down through generations. These mirrors reflect not just the past but the possibility of new futures.

The Clark Atlanta University Art Museum has been collecting African American art and art of the African Diaspora since the Atlanta University Art Annuals competition began in 1942. Since then, the collection has continued to evolve and grow, it has become a representation of a comprehensive African American art history. As the museum continues to develop exhibitions, the permanent collection will remain the priority. Rediscovery emphasizes the importance and relevance of the collection within the American art historical narrative. It also acknowledges that the permanent collection has never been seen in its entirety but will exhibit works that have remained unseen or exhibited in recent years, new acquisitions, undergone conservation, pieces that travel. This exhibition includes works by Samella Sanders Lewis, Henri Linton, Radcliffe Bailey, John Rhoden, and John Woodrow Wilson among others.

Host or Publisher Clark Atlanta University Art Museum