Haggerty Museum to present ‘Thresholds,’ pairing four Black artists with its African collection

The Patrick and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University will present ‘Thresholds,’ an exhibition bringing together the work of Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Portia Cobb, Stephen Hamilton and Daniel Minter. The exhibition will be on view in Milwaukee from August 28 through December 19, 2026, and will place the artists’ multimedia practices in dialogue with works from the museum’s African art collection.

According to the museum, the exhibition explores the depth, complexity and resilience of Black cultural memory. Its title refers to the space between the seen and unseen, the present and the ancestral, and places left behind and arrived at. The museum describes the presentation as a “call and response”: a participatory exchange in which contemporary artworks and collection objects answer one another across time, geography and cultural experience.

The exhibition’s framework treats cultural memory as active rather than fixed. The Haggerty says the artists’ practices draw on a shared but continually unfolding history in which the past remains “active and unresolved,” becoming a source of inspiration, critical reflection and renewal. Their works will be shown alongside African objects from the museum’s holdings rather than presented as a separate historical display.

Bell is a multimedia artist whose work addresses diasporic identity as plural and continually in process, giving form to the many selves and masks carried by Black women. Cobb works with video, photography and mixed media rooted in her Gullah Geechee maternal heritage, gathering oral histories and rites that resist what she calls “forced forgetting.” Hamilton weaves, dyes and carves by hand, using methods he studied in Nigeria and making monumental painted textiles grounded in Yorùbá thought and the recovery of craft knowledge.

Minter carves and assembles wood, metal and found objects within Black Atlantic spiritual traditions. He describes his art as a “technology” for reaching ancestral strength and knowledge. The museum’s listed works include Cobb’s ‘Sande Society Girls: Rite of Passage’ (2019), Minter’s ‘Directionality’ (2025), Bell’s ‘Gold and Shadow’ (2020), and Hamilton’s ‘Oníṣàngó . . . Those Who Carry the Burden of Fire on Their Head’ (2020). The works are credited as being courtesy of the artists.

‘Thresholds’ is organized in partnership with the Indigo Arts Alliance, an artist residency and incubator in Portland, Maine, committed to the artistic development of Black and Brown artists. It forms part of the Haggerty’s fall 2026 exhibition programme, presented under the overarching title ‘The Otherworld is Home,’ which the museum’s August newsletter describes as a museum-wide presentation addressing personal reclamation, cultural identity, spiritual passage and connections across Africa’s diasporas.

The Haggerty Museum of Art is free and open to the public. During the exhibition period, its listed hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Support for ‘Thresholds’ is provided by Lilly Endowment Inc. and the Martha and Ray Smith, Jr. Endowment Fund.