BIRMINGHAM, Ala — The Birmingham Museum of Art is asking the public to help solve a decades-old mystery: what happened to the artwork from a 1963 solo exhibition by Corietta Mitchell, the first Black artist to have a one-woman show at the museum during segregation.
As the museum marks its 75th anniversary this year, staff are trying to track down paintings, prints and other works by Mitchell, a central figure in Birmingham’s Black arts community whose exhibition once drew hundreds of visitors and headlines across Alabama. Officials say that despite contemporary news coverage and Mitchell’s local prominence, they have not been able to locate a single surviving example of her work from that era.
The museum opened in 1951 as a city-run institution in the Jim Crow South, when local law limited Black visitors to one designated day a week. In March 1963, four months before Birmingham officially repealed its segregation ordinances, then-director Richard Howard quietly organized a solo show for Mitchell, who led Birmingham’s Black Art Club, taught school, and was trained as a classical pianist. A Birmingham News article at the time reported that more than 600 people attended the exhibition and that it made news across the state.
Today, what the museum has left from that show is an exhibition checklist and a grainy newspaper photograph, but no confirmed Mitchell works in its collection. Museum leaders say that absence has become more glaring as they reassess the institution’s history and acknowledge how segregation shaped who was able to enter the building and whose art was collected. The search for Mitchell’s art is part of a broader push at the museum to confront its past while expanding the stories it tells about Birmingham’s Black cultural legacy.
The museum is appealing to family members, former students, church members and anyone else who may have known Mitchell, purchased her work or seen it in homes, schools or local institutions. Staff say even a single located painting or print could help reconstruct her career and restore a nearly lost chapter of city and museum history. National art publications have already highlighted the search, noting that if enough works surface, they could form the basis of a new exhibition revisiting Mitchell’s contributions and the circumstances that once pushed them to the margins.