Black History Month

February 1 – 28, 2025

BHCC Library and Learning Commons
Explore the collections from the BHCC Library that honors and celebrates the achievements by African Americans and the important role of Blacks in U.S. history. See the expanded LibGuides: Educational Resources for Teaching and Learning.

BHCC Museum Partnerships with related Current Exhibits
www.bhcc.edu/library/museumpasses

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
www.gardnermuseum.org
Mickalene Thomas: Sandra, She’s A Beauty, 2009
Through February 17, 2025
On the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, the photo collage of a mother, crafted by her daughter, welcomes visitors to the Gardner Museum. Clothed in regal red, Sandra Bush, mother of award-winning multidisciplinary artist Mickalene Thomas, both recalls and rejects the dominant canon of Western portraiture with a radiant smile. An artist whose work aims to embolden, Thomas began to photograph Sandra while she was a student at Yale. This lightning rod moment gave birth to numerous paintings, collage works, and photographs that serve as a daughter’s homage of self-possessed beauty.

Museum of Science
www.mos.org
Black History Month Celebration Weekend
February 1, 2025
The Museum of Science celebrates the month with a special weekend event that includes featured speakers, family activities, performance and community groups from the Boston area. Then, throughout the month, MOS will continue spotlighting influential scientists and engineers as part of the Black History Month celebration.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
www.mfa.org
Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson
A Roxbury Artist’s Vision of America
February 8 – June 22, 2025
Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, John Wilson (1922–2015) is one of Boston’s most esteemed artists. His work, made over the span of 60 years, continues to resonate with the persistent realities of disenfranchisement, racial prejudice, and social injustice. Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is the largest-ever exhibition of Wilson’s work, co-organized by the MFA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Featuring approximately 110 works by the artist in a wide range of media—prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and illustrated books—the exhibition explores the many ways Wilson called attention to racial, social, and economic injustices through his art.

Black Power in Print – Beyond the Gallery
Image Gallery
In the late 1960s and ‘70s the Black Power movement utilized graphic imagery to promote its political platform and communicate the Black experience to broad communities. The images tell fragments of the story.

Harvard Art Museums
www.harvardartmuseums.org

Spotlight Tour: A Noble Churn, with Milen Negasi and Hanna Carney
February 9, 2025
February 16. 2025
2:00 – 2:50 p.m.
On this tour Negasi ’25 and Carney ’25 will explore the theme of glory through the works of three Black American artists. The stops on the tour are Kerry James Marshall’s, untitled painting (2008), Bessie Harvey’s sculpture, Figure with Headdress (1986) and a storage jar (1840) by David Drake.

Spotlight Tour: Portraiture by 19^th Century Black American Artists, with Sophia Scott
February 23, 2025
2:00 – 2:50 p.m.
On this tour, Scott ’25 will examine the contributions of Black artists whose labor and skill were central to shaping American art, even as the artists themselves remained excluded from many of its spaces. We will look at how these artists navigated the constraints of their time by creating portraits, often of white subjects. These works invite us to reconsider whose stories are seen and valued. The stops on the tour will be Joshua Johnson’s Portrait of a Young Woman (c.1810-15), Julien Hudson’s Portrait of a Young Woman in White (1840), and Edmonia Lewis’ marble bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1871).

Spotlight Tours offer a chance to explore the collections of the Harvard Art Museums through the eyes of a Harvard student.Drop in and join the conversation!

Museum of African American History
www.maah.org
Celebrate Black History Month 365

Let the Children Sing! A Tribute to William Cooper Nell
February 9, 2025
3 – 4 p.m.
Join the Beacon Hill Civic Association and the Museum of African American History for a transformative afternoon that intertwines the power of music and the spoken word as we celebrate the life and legacy of William Cooper Nell, a pioneering abolitionist, author and advocate for education for African Americans who believed that knowledge was key to empowerment. A BHCC friend and acclaimed educator and storyteller, Regie Gibson will capture Nell’s fervent spirit.

Institute of Contemporary Art
www.icaboston.org
AAMARP
February 12 – August 2, 2026
The first and only in-residence program for Black artists in the United States, the African American Master Artist-in-Residence Program (AAMARP) was founded at Northeastern University in 1977 by influential artist and educator Dana C. Chandler, Jr. This exhibition presents artists and artworks affiliated with AAMARP and archival materials presented with the same “eye towards a diversity of visual arts disciplines and aesthetics” espoused in its founding to contextualize the program’s extraordinary legacy and its continued relevance today. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue surveying the program’s meaningful history.

For nearly fifty years, AAMARP has been a vital outgrowth of the Black Arts Movement in Boston with a mission to afford a “living focus” on “the diverse dynamics of African American aesthetics” by providing studio spaces for artists, presenting numerous exhibitions, and serving as a meaningful meeting place.

Thursday, February 18 | 1 p.m. | A-300 Lobby
The Rush for Black Diamonds
Join author and BHCC Professor George Walters-Sleyon as he shares on the topic of his latest book The Rush for Black Diamonds, Volume One. It explores the Transatlantic slave trade and its mutation into chattel slavery focusing on the involvement of two prominent Enlightenment philosophers: British philosopher, John Locke and President Thomas Jefferson, both slave traders and slave masters. Used as a metaphor, Black Diamonds captures the exploration of Western nations’ rush for Black people across the Atlantic Ocean to be used as economic units and chattel property.

Presenter Dr. George Walters-Sleyon, Professor, Behavioral Science Department
Welcome by Denise Turner, Manager, the Office of College Events and Cultural Planning
Sponsored by the Division of Behavioral, Social Sciences and Global Learning and the Office of College Events and Cultural Planning

Thursday, February 20 | 1 p.m. |  A-300 Lobby
In collaboration with the HOPE Initiative
Determined Spirit – The Legacy of Maggie Lena Walker, Entrepreneur & Banking Pioneer

Join us for a Black history lesson like never before with Muqeedah Salaam and Frederick Williams as they set the record straight with their presentation on Maggie L. Walker, entrepreneur, civic leader and the first African American woman to pioneer the banking industry from their HIS-TOR-I-CAL-LY COR-RECT lecture series as they bring the truth to a relatively unknown Black American.

Presenters Muqeedah Salaam and Frederick Williams, HIS-TOR-I-CAL-LY COR-RECT and Salaam Publishing

Welcome by Denise Turner, Manager, the Office of College Events and Cultural Planning
Opening Remarks by Guimard Saint Germain, HOPE Success Navigator, The HOPE Initiative

Sponsored by The HOPE Initiative and the Office of College Events and Cultural Planning