In March 1963, four months before Birmingham's segregation laws were repealed, the city's museum quietly staged an exhibition for Corietta Mitchell, a prominent figure in the Black arts community. It was a small act of resistance in a segregated institution — but it was also invisible. The museum, founded in 1951 when Jim Crow laws restricted Black visitors to a single designated day per week, kept no record that mattered. Today, seventy years later, the Birmingham Museum of Art is asking the public to help find Mitchell's work.
None of the pieces from that 1963 exhibition have been located. All that remains is a checklist and a grainy photograph. As the museum marks its 75th anniversary, it's openly acknowledging what it calls a missing piece of its own history — and asking anyone who might know where Mitchell's paintings are to come forward.
A Reckoning With the Past
Museum director Graham Boettcher framed the search plainly: "We're looking back at the past and acknowledging our history — the good, the bad, and the ugly." This kind of institutional honesty is becoming more common across American museums. The Met has mounted major exhibitions on the Harlem Renaissance and lesser-known Black artists. The Studio Museum in Harlem, which recently reopened its newly designed building, has spent decades centering African American and diasporic voices in art history. Other institutions are mounting retrospectives and surveys designed to correct decades of omission.
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Corietta Mitchell's work exists somewhere. It was painted, exhibited, reviewed in newspapers at the time. But without institutional memory, without deliberate preservation, it became invisible. The search for her paintings is also a search for the fuller story of what Birmingham's art scene actually was — not what the official records claimed.
The museum is asking anyone with information about Mitchell or her artwork to contact them. It's a quiet appeal, but it carries weight: the recognition that recovering these works isn't just about filling a gap in a collection. It's about telling a more complete story of who shaped American art, and who was there all along.
