FREE and open to the public.
Exhibition on view November 6, 2024-February 25, 2025
Library hours (with Asmaa Walton in attendance): November 6, 1-4 pm; November 11, 1:30-4 pm; and November 12, 1:30-4 pm.
If traditional institutions fail us, how do we ensure just access to knowledge—how do we create, share, and preserve cultural memory?
What is possible with a more complete and accessible cultural record?
--Mellon Foundation
Call & Response: Asmaa Walton and the Black Art Library is a public humanities project that asks how we create, share, and preserve cultural memory for a more complete and accessible cultural record.
Join us on November 23, from 2-5 pm, for a reception for Asmaa Walton, Head Librarian in Charge of the Black Art Library. At 2:30 pm we will host The Archive as a Tool to Reimagine Racial Justice, a panel discussion with Walton and Milwaukee artist/archivists Evelyn Patricia Terry and Della Wells.
Click here for more information about the Black Art Library.
About the Panelists
Asmaa Walton is a Detroit native, arts educator, and ardent developer of the Black cultural archive. Walton completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education at Michigan State University in 2017. Upon earning a Master of Arts in Art Politics from New York University Tisch School of the Arts in 2018, Walton joined the Toledo Museum of Art as an Education and Engagement Intern. In the same year she was appointed the Museum’s first KeyBank Fellow in Diversity Leadership, a position in which she identified opportunities for diversity and equity programming across museums and cultural institutions. In 2019, Walton was appointed Romare Bearden graduate Museum Fellow at Saint Louis Art Museum. In February 2020, Walton established Black Art Library–-a collection of publications, exhibition catalogues and theoretical texts about Black art and visual culture intended to become a public archive in a permanent space in Detroit. In the interim, Black Art Library acts as a traveling exhibition, allowing many different communities to experience it. The collection has traveled beyond Detroit to cities such as Cleveland, San Antonio, Houston and, most recently, London. The nearly 900 books that populate the library (a portion of them will be on view at Lynden) are sourced from a variety of online sales and donors, with special effort placed on supporting Black-owned bookstores.
As a full-time professional artist, Evelyn Patricia Terry has artwork in more than 500 public, private, and corporate collections. Since 1970, she has attracted patrons through partnerships with various galleries, consultants, and museums, namely the Milwaukee Art Museum, Posner Art Gallery, Katie Gingrass Gallery, Peltz Gallery, Nikki Bender & Co., and Sally Stevens, LT, in Milwaukee; the Valperine Gallery in Madison; Isobel Neal Gallery and Murphy Rabb Inc. in Chicago; and Vamp and Tramp Booksellers in Birmingham, Alabama.
Along with the notable private Cynthia Sears Collection, dozens of public collections contain Evelyn's artwork, including Marquette University's Haggerty Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Racine Art Museum, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Beloit College's Wright Museum of Art, Swarthmore College Libraries, Duke University's Perkins Library, Rhode Island School of Design's Fleet Library, UW - Milwaukee's Golda Meir Library, and Stanford University's Bowes Art & Architecture Library.
Besides exhibiting at the aforementioned museums, Terry's artwork has been shown in solo, invitational, and juried exhibitions such as the Bainbridge Island Art Museum in Seattle, WA; the Cedarburg Art Museum in Cedarburg, WI; the Charles Allis Art Museum in Milwaukee, WI; and the Whitney Museum in New York City. Internationally, Terry attended her U.S. Embassy Moscow solo exhibition in Russia and has shown in group exhibitions in Japan, Germany, and Spain.
Open to exploring diverse media, such as printmaking, pastels, mixed media monotypes, installations, collage, public art, and book arts, Terry’s artwork has attracted several exhibition awards with the most impactful being a "purchase award" for her watermelon pastel at the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, Georgia. Her installations received an Intermedia/McKnight Interdisciplinary Fellowship (Minneapolis) and a Milwaukee County Fellowship. The Milwaukee Arts Board Artist of the Year Award and the Wisconsin Visual Art Achievement Award are important career acknowledgments.
Among significant commissions are an oil painting titled Who Will Love Me Better? for Beloit College's Wright Museum of Art, four mixed-media chine collé prints for the John and Murph Burke Art Collection at Milwaukee's Convention Center, Miller Brewing Company's 12 oil portraits for their 1989 Gallery of Greats calendar, Black Attorneys: Counsels For The Cause, and a lithograph edition titled Until the Magic Comes for Philadelphia's Brandywine Press. Terry's public art projects, fabricated by George Ray McCormick, Sr., include Giving Gifts (12 painted metal sculptures) installed at the Milwaukee County General Mitchell Airport parking structure and Kindred Ties (16 painted metal panels enhancing a standard bus shelter) near Milwaukee’s Bronzeville neighborhood.
Born in 1951, Della Wells is a self-taught artist who began drawing and painting in earnest at the age of 42 and her creative process stems primarily from her personal experiences embellished through the art of storytelling into visual work. Wells' work has been written about and has appeared in several publications including the New York Times, Betty-Carol Sellen's and Cynthia J. Johanson’s book, Self Taught, Outsider and Folk Art, A Guide to American Artists, Locations and Resources, 2000 and 2016 ed. and one of her images appears in a children's book The Classic Treasury of Childhood Wonders: Favorite Adventures, Stories, Poems and Songs For Making Lasting Memories, published by National Geographic and written by Susan Magsamen. In 2011, an award-winning play inspired by her life, '' Don't Tell Me I Can't Fly,” premiered in Milwaukee. The play was commissioned by Milwaukee First Stage Children 's Theatre and written by Y York. In 2010, the play was selected to be read at the Kennedy Center in Washington D. C., for its New Visions, New Voices Festival. Wells illustrated a children's book, The Electric Train, by Nanci Mortimer. Her work is also included in Black Collagists by Teri Henderson, A Creative Place: The History of Wisconsin Art by Tom Lidtke and Annemarie Sawkins, BEYOND 70: The Lives of Creative Women by Stacy Russo, and What Type of Collage Is That by Katie Blake.
Wells has exhibited in various galleries, museums, art fairs, and art festivals throughout the United States, Italy, and British Columbia. Venues include the Hickory Museum of Art, Hurn Museum of Contemporary Folk Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, John Michael Kohler Center For the Arts, Milwaukee Art Institute of Design, the Appleton Art Center, Kentuck Festival of Arts, Huntsville Museum of Art, the Loyola Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Alverno College, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Costal Museum, Outsider Art Fair in New York, Miami Art Basel, Mark Woolley Gallery, 5 Points Art Gallery and Studios, Wright Museum of Art, Clayton Gallery, The Warehouse, the Penn Center, the Cedarburg Art Museum, David Barnett Gallery, Portrait Society Gallery, Andrew Edlin Gallery, Kentuck Art Center, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, the Charles Allis Museum, the Outsider Art Fair in New York, Folkfest, and Miami’s Art Basel. Her dolls, cards and collages are currently sold at the Smithsonian‘s National African Museum of History and Culture in Washington DC. Inuit Center For Intuitive and Outsider Art in Chicago sells her dolls and cards. She has been a featured artist at the Kentuck Festival of Arts, the largest art festival which features folk, self-taught, and outsider art in the United States. In 2023, she was the Annette and Dale Schuh Visiting Artist at UW-Whitewater. Her work is in over 100 private, corporate, and museum collections including Northwestern Mutual Insurance, Milwaukee Bucks, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Hurn Museum of Contemporary Folk Art, the Wright Museum of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art.
This project is funded in part by a grant from Wisconsin Humanities, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Wisconsin Humanities strengthens our democracy through educational and cultural programs that build connections and understanding among people of all backgrounds and beliefs throughout the state. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this project do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding comes from the Greater Milwaukee Foundation and the Ruth Foundation for the Arts.
