Hale Woodruff’s ‘The Underground Railroad’ Headed North To Ohio

Four treasures of America art history are saying farewell to their home of over 80 years to be shared more widely with the nation. Tiny Talladega College–enrollment 689 undergraduates last fall–55 miles east of Birmingham, AL has reached agreement on the sale of four of Hale Woodruff’s (1900-1980) six monumental paintings commissioned by the college in the 1930s. HBCU’s have always been a major benefactor for African American artists excluded by race from mainstream (white) museums, galleries, and collections.

The buyers are the Toledo Museum of Art–one of the country’s sneakiest best museums due to the area’s Gilded Age industrial and transportation wealth and the artwork it purchased–along with Art Bridges Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art–two of the most well-financed arts foundations in the country. Walmart heiress Alice Walton provides the money for Art Bridges. Reporting in The New York Times estimated the total sale price at around $20 million.

That windfall will be used to boost the school’s endowment and support operating expenses. Enrollment at Alabama’s first private Historically Black College with roots going back to 1865 plunged after COVID and hasn’t recover. With higher education now under attack by the federal government, Talladega College is pulling out all the stops to secure its future existence.

Art advisory group del Rio | Byers assisted the College in finding appropriate new homes for the paintings. Art Bridges and the Terra Foundation have jointly acquired three paintings depicting the Amistad uprising and its aftermath, the largest of which, The Trial of the Amistad Captives (1939), spans over 20 feet in width. The Toledo Museum of Art has acquired The Underground Railroad (1942). Two paintings showing the founding of Talladega and the building of the school’s Savery Library will continue to be owned by the College and remain on campus.

To Ohio, Then And Now

The Underground Railroad portrays a scene of freedom seekers fleeing north from enslavement in the South. They presumably stand in Kentucky–a slave state–looking north across the Ohio River to Ohio–a free state.

Woodruff painted “State Line–Ohio, .5 miles” on the house at right with a hand pointing in the direction of a river, the Ohio River based on the steamer chugging away.

“Much of the African American population of Toledo traces its genealogy to individuals who fled on the Underground Railroad, so this will be deeply meaningful for our audience,” Adam M Levine, Edward Drummond and Florence Scott Libbey, Director and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art, told Forbes.com. “Toledo was, itself, a stop on the Underground Railroad, and there is still a historic house that was used, Wolcott House, and James Ashley, who is one of the radical Republicans who drafted the 13th Amendment, wasn’t born in Toledo, but moved to Toledo, represented Toledo in D.C., and was buried in Toledo.”

Three key objectives guided the process: ensuring a stable and vibrant future for the College, expanding the profile of the school, and increasing the visibility of Woodruff’s exceptional paintings.

The cash takes care of the first, with the second two going hand in hand. As the artworks travel the country in the coming years and decades and are seen by millions who would never have heard of the College or come within 100 miles of its campus, they serve in a unique marketing capacity.

“Art Bridges believes everyone deserves access to art, and this joint acquisition allows us to do just that,” Anne Kraybill, CEO of Art Bridges, said. “Through our growing partner network of over 320 museums, we will share ‘The Amistad Series’ with audiences nationwide that might not otherwise have access to them, ensuring these works stay in the public trust while expanding the legacy of Hale A. Woodruff and Talladega College.”

A cynic might look at this and assume it another example of rich, white institutions taking brilliant Black artwork out of a Black community. Levine refutes that perspective.

“It strips autonomy from Talladega College to make autonomous and legitimate governance decisions, which is why we partnered with them,” he said. “This is not an outcome that we dictated, this was an outcome that was co-created as a group among a group of partners. We worked together to create a solution that was driven by Talladega College. That argument totally disregards the actual process and actually does the thing it’s arguing against, it strips Talladega College of any right to determine the outcomes of its own property.”

If access to art by African Americans among African Americans is a concern, the paintings leaving Talladega College serve that purpose better than them staying there.

Not quite 30% of Toledo’s roughly 270,000 residents are Black or African American. Those 80-plus thousand people dwarf the African American community in and around Talladega.

“The Toledo Museum of Art’s visitation is totally representative of the community it serves; our audience looks exactly like our metropolitan statistical area,” Levine explained. “When Underground Railroad is on display in Toledo, it will reach everyone from every walk of life.”

The paintings have left the college once before.

In 2011, Talladega College partnered with the High Museum of Art to conserve and bring Woodruff’s murals to a broader audience. The paintings toured to several institutions across the United States until early 2015 before returning to campus and The Dr. William R. Harvey Museum of Art in 2020.

They will also return again.

“Through the reunion of these paintings periodically, which will not only be incredible, will not only be great for the students and for the faculty and for the community, but we hope will also be a reason for people from all over to visit, to experience these paintings together in situ,” Levine added.

The Toledo Museum of Art is in the process of a major collection reinstallation. The Underground Railroad will feature prominently in that reinstallation. For the time being, the painting remains at Talladega College. TMA is exploring the possibility with Art Bridges and the Terra Foundation of traveling the paintings together for an exhibition in 2026, whatever the case, The Underground Railroad will go on view in Toledo no later than 2027.

Superlative

While not discounting the value of increasing representation for Black artists and Black subject matter at the TMA–an effort prominently boosted through the acquisition of African American Southern folk art in the early 2020s from Souls Grown Deep Foundation, the premiere private collection of such artwork in the world–Levine asserts the museum’s acquisitions have more to do with excellence than identity.

“It’s superlative, and that’s what we do in Toledo,” he said. “We see beauty without bias. We believe that quality is the most egalitarian concept that there is. That it doesn’t matter where you’re from, it doesn’t matter what you look like, that (quality) is not correlated with any demographic characteristic. If it’s great, it’s great, and Woodruff’s Underground Railroad is an exceptional painting.”

When long time The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith reviewed the traveling exhibit more than a decade ago, she considered The Underground Railroad to be perhaps the premiere example of 1930s/40s American realism and muralism.

“If you were to look at the things we’ve acquired over the past five years, even over 125 years, we hadn’t always had a system that delivered global quality, even though we aspire to it,” Levine said. “We have now built a system in terms of acquisition resources, curators that cover the globe, and as a consequence, we are finding great things from every time period, from every geography. The Souls Grown Deep acquisition and the Hale Woodruff fit into that bucket right alongside (other recent acquisitions including) a Safavid carpet, right alongside a Yemeni alabaster figure, right alongside a Japanese screen by Maruyama Okyo (1733-95) we just purchased, right alongside contemporary photography.”

The color. The line. The composition. The humanity in the faces. The storytelling. The details.

In the background left, regard the slave catcher spurring on horse and hounds in pursuit of the freedom seekers. The villain rides over a barren, brown, wasted landscape. Contrast that to the life-giving greens and blues on the banks and beyond the Ohio River. Notice all the sawed down trees and plowed fields, social commentary of another subject.

The figures depicted by Woodruff in The Underground Railroad appear as though they could spring from the artwork at any moment, continuing their hasty, desperate journey north.

Worry not.

They made it.

To Ohio. All the way to Toledo.

To freedom.

More From Forbes

Forbes‘Beauty Without Bias’ At The Toledo Museum Of ArtBy Chadd ScottForbes‘To Be Sold’: Artwork And Conversation Putting A Face And Name On SlaveryBy Chadd ScottForbesHow Art, History And Social Justice Came Together At Mississippi’s Tougaloo CollegeBy Chadd Scott