An Alabama HBCU Is Selling Historic Murals in First-of-its-Kind Partnership

Talladega College will sell four of its six Hale Woodruff murals, which commemorate the Undergound Railroad and the mutiny of Amistad

Mary Randolph | Correspondent

October 30, 2025

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Talladega College has housed Hale Woodruff’s famed murals, which commemorate African American history, since the artist created them almost a century ago. Now, in an effort to secure the school’s future, the historically black college has sold the paintings in a new partnership with three other institutions.

Three of Woodruff’s six murals depict the 1839 mutiny on the Spanish slave ship Amistad, when enslaved Africans revolted against the captain, and the trial and repatriation that followed. Talladega sold these paintings, created in 1939 for the mutiny's centennial, to the Art Bridges Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art, both of which lend out art to public institutions. Two murals, commissioned several years later, depict Talladega’s opening and construction; these works will remain at the college. A final mural, purchased by the Toledo Museum of Art, depicts the Underground Railroad.

Adam Levine, director and CEO of the Toledo Museum of Art, tells Artnet’s Brian Boucher that the museum is looking forward to having The Underground Railroad in its collection, especially given Toledo’s role “as a final stop on the Underground Railroad.”

“There’s no question that these are extraordinary artworks, but this really was about how to support the college,” Levine says. “The center of the partnership is not a transaction or a transfer of ownership. It’s a set of principles that Talladega decided were best for the institution, and they were incredibly thoughtful and get a lot of the credit.”

Talladega has an endowment of $5 million, compared with the average endowment of $255 million for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), and a current student population of 745. Rica Lewis-Payton, the school’s board chair who oversaw the sale of the murals, decided to pursue the sale after Talladega could not meet its payroll in May 2024, reports Arthur Lubow for the New York Times.

“It required deliberate thought and execution,” Lewis-Payton tells Lubow. “I sit here today feeling good that we are leveraging this most prized possession in a way that will improve the ability of the college to provide a foundational education for people like me.”

To navigate the process, Lewis-Payton turned to art consultants for guidance, including Nina del Rio, formerly the vice chairman for advisory services at Sotheby’s. Del Rio tells Artnet that they originally hoped to sell all six murals together but could not find an institution that could display six works of this scope, some of which are 20 feet wide.

Pricing the murals also posed a challenge, del Rio says, as other works by Woodruff had rarely sold for over six figures, Artnet reports. Relying on two private solicitations and these murals’ place as “the pinnacle of the artist’s career,” del Rio says, the school and its advisers settled on an agreeable price with the three partner institutions. According to the New York Times, art experts estimate the sale brought the school $20 million.

“The value that we were able to secure is very ambitious and really spectacular,” del Rio tells Artnet, “but part of the value is the partnership.”

In a condition of the sale, all six works will be reunited every six to eight years at Talladega, which originally commissioned the murals on Amistad in 1939, followed by the second set of murals in 1942.

Woodruff was directing the art department at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University), another HBCU, at the time, and had not heard of the widely forgotten Amistad saga before he began the work. Across the three paintings, enslaved Africans overwhelm their captors, face trial in Connecticut, and are eventually acquitted and repatriated. Del Rio tells Artnet the works are “amazing.”

“It’s like reading a book in front you,” she says, “You’re watching the narrative unfold.”

In their place at the university, the murals only get around 500 visitors annually, says Willie Todd, the college’s president, to the New York Times. This sale, Todd says, will not only fund the school’s goals but broaden the reach of these histories.

“This is going to expand the branding of our institution, and they will witness the beauty of this artwork around the world,” he says.

Editor’s note, October 31, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify that Nina del Rio no longer works for Sotheby’s.

Mary Randolph | Read More

Mary Randolph is a former editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.