Morehouse College professor John Hewitt and his librarian wife Vivian assembled this important collection of African American artists. Some threads tie the works together. Several of the artists were WPA muralists, and devotees of Diego Rivera. One, Elizabeth Catlett, started a co-op for Mexican graphic artists. Still others found their vision of liberation in Caribbean art.

Especially touching are the lithographs by John T. Biggers, showing a paradise for black families, embracing in reunion. In his 1975 "Twins of Morning," two girl children visit an elder under a peach tree, as doves and tortoises watch. 

Romare Bearden excels as a collage artist, but even in lithographs he works Matissean flat planes of color. His 1984 "Homage to Mary Lou" is, for all its color, slightly somber. There's something weighted and dissonant about the too-deep concentration of the pupil and the teacher.

Alvin C. Hollingsworth, by contrast, demonstrates playfulness in his 1978 India ink and oil "African Village." Elongated villagers study the sky, before a landscape of conical huts, iron pots and drooping palm trees. There's an empty open space in front of the group. Perhaps they're all waiting for the tourist bus to arrive?

One of the finest paintings in the show, Ernest Crichlow's 1948 oil "Woman in a Blue Coat," is perhaps the most stylistically conservative. Pensive, lovely, slightly worried, she is posed outside of a frosty city window. As Soul Power came of age, Crichlow did more impressive subjects who hold their own against both urban and garden backgrounds. Note Crichlow's vivid coppery-green and tan seriagraph of a seated "Street Princess" (1982) eyeing her domain. It is just one more figurative work featuring the kind of figures usually excluded from other museums' exhibitions.

*Images, from top to bottom:  Ann Tanksley, "Canal Builders II, 1989," oil on linen. Eugene J. Grigsby, "Abstraction in  Red and Black, ca. 1963," oil on canvas,  26" x 34."  Jonathan Green, "Folding Sheets, 1989," acrylic on canvas, 20" x 15" x 3/4." Romare Bearden, "Jamming at the Savoy, ca.1988," lithograph, 22" x 30." Henry Ossawa Turner, "Gate in Tangiers, ca. 1910," oil on canvas, 15.25" x 15."

all images courtesy of Bank of America.