Beyond the Museum Walls

Explore the John & Vivian Hewitt Collection of African-American Art

This labor of love, created by two avid collectors over a fifty-year period, is the cornerstone of The Gantt collection. Of modest means – Mrs. Hewitt was a librarian and Mr. Hewitt a medical journalist and freelance writer – the couple’s shared passion for collecting led them to amass a unique assemblage of art. The collection, bought by Bank of America and pledged to the Gantt Center in 1998, includes fifty-eight two dimensional works of art created by twenty artists.

Using the link below, you can learn more about these wonderful works of art and the amazing artists who created them. Each piece is represented on the Search the Collections homepage by a thumbnail image; click on this image to view a larger image and learn about each piece. To learn more about the artists, click on their names under the object record or use the search tools to find specific artists.

Search the Hewitt Collection

A generous gift from Bank of America

This project to catalogue, digitize and document the Hewitt Collection was made possible in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts (#12-4400-7057) and a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services (#MH-00-11-0003-11).