Digital Exhibitions

Where the Waters Made Us is a digital exhibition of charcoal drawings by Detroit artist M. Saffell Gardner that explores Blackness as a process of rupture, transformation, and remaking across the Black Atlantic. Through images of sails, water, spirals, and sacred symbols, the exhibition reimagines the Middle Passage not only as a site of profound violence, but also as a space where new Black worlds, cultures, and cosmologies emerged.

Curated by Michael Cortor and Dr. Kelli Morgan, this exhibition explores the Black Chicago Renaissance (1930s–1950s) as a chorus of voices—painters, printmakers, writers, poets, and playwrights—each weaving stories of Black life through brushstrokes and verse. Eldzier Cortor stood among them, his work in conversation with artists such as Margaret Burroughs, Archibald Motley, Elizabeth Catlett, and Charles White, as well as the literary contributions of Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks. Alongside figures like Gordon Parks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright, they shaped a movement that was both a reckoning and a rebirth—one in which Black creativity refused confinement.