In the breezeway linking Founders Library to the Wayne A. Frederick Undergraduate Library, students, artists and the Howard community gathered for the opening of “Forever, Always: The Black Love Exhibit,” where artifacts, paintings and photos lined the white walls.
Canvases popped with color, drawing in viewers’ eyes with the stories they told, while photos in gray hues illustrated the lives of a young couple or family in the early 1900s. In the air, sounds of the Black diaspora and classic love songs mixed with laughter and comments of admiration or surprise. There, in the hallway, was a space for all who knew the universal experience of Black love.
“We wanted to utilize Moorland-Spingarn Research Center’s collections to illustrate how myriad and kaleidoscopic the expression of Black love is,” said MarQuis Bullock, one of five co-curators and an archivist. “We wanted to provide like a space that was kind of medicinal, I suppose, like spiritually, soulfully medicinal for the Howard community, and of course, all others to come and bask in a very special energy.”
The origins of this exhibition trace back seven months when university archivist and the inspiration behind the installation, Sonya Woods, received a collection of letters salvaged from the trash.
These letters were donated to the research center by Los Angeles resident Steve Lindemann. They chronicled the correspondence between two star-crossed lovers in the 1930s: a Howard student and his hometown sweetheart.
“Some of those letters were written on Howard letterhead, so that’s why [Lindemann] sent the whole pack of letters found in the trash in L.A. to Howard University, and they made their way to my office,” Woods said.
Woods continued to explain that “he wrote a little note in there with a Sharpie, saying ‘I found these in the trash, didn’t know what to do with them, so I’m sending them to you. Maybe you can do something with them.’”
Many other objects of affection told similar hidden stories of Black love, such as letters expressing gratitude to former head librarian and curator of Moorland, Dorothy Porter. There were photos of little Black girls playing hand games. A red phone booth decorated with vibrant flowers that shares the personal anecdotes of Howard students and staff.
Connecting each section of the exhibit were themes detailing the different types of love in Twi, the native language of Ghana, accompanied by adinkra symbols.
While the exhibit highlighted Moorland’s collection of Black art and Howard’s history, it also featured the work of Howard’s very own visual artists. One of them was Halia Benn, who served as a student co-curator for the project.
Four of their oil paintings are displayed, commemorating how affectionate, familial, community and unconditional love appear in their own life. Their contributions also included the recreation of an altar dipped in gold and draped with white lace.
“The altar piece Ms. Woods and I created together. And it’s supposed to resemble a home veneration altar that’s more characteristic of Black American, every day like quotidian practice,” Benn said.
Sacha Reid’s realistic self-portrait, sprinkled with various kinds of berries, reflected the challenges of accepting her own Blackness as a young woman.
“My painting is called ‘The Blacker the Berry.’ It celebrates self-love, and then it’s also a love letter to younger Black girls, especially the one I used to be,” Reid said. “I always searched for a lot of representation. I never really found it in the area where I grew up in West Virginia, and it was just really important to me to showcase how beautiful Blackness is.”
For co-curator and archivist Christiana McClain, it was important to demonstrate how Black love has endured throughout centuries in the face of all odds. She decided to create a collage of information-wanted ads that were placed by formerly enslaved Black people in search of their loved ones.
“To me, I couldn’t find a more pure and persistent form of love between Black people than Black people actively searching for each other after slavery, despite not knowing where anybody might be, despite people trying to tell them that they may not exist anymore, despite the fact that there were no literate records of those people,” she said.
Archivist and exhibit curator Abdeena Barrie shared that while she aimed to create a safe space for Howard students and all Black people, she also hoped to inspire deeper reflection on how Black love can be embraced as a daily practice.
“We wanted it to embody a sense of home, a sense of familiarity for a lot of Black people. But also expose them to something new, something different, something they didn’t think could be Black love,” Barrie said. “We want to show them that, yes, this actually is black love. And you should think about the ways black love is demonstrated in your life.”
Copy edited by Camiryn Stepteau
