Jamaica native to lead Amistad Center
Sarah Anita Clunis was named the new executive director of the Amistad Center for Art & Culture earlier this month.
Originally from Jamaica, she has taught art history at colleges and universities for two decades and was the director of the art gallery at Xavier University in Ohio. She studied art and art history at Simmons College in Boston and got her PH.D. in art history from the University of Iowa.
“My experience is specifically in academic institutions,” Clunis said. “What attracted me to the Amistad Center was that it was not in a university.”
The Amistad Center for Art & Culture was created in 1987 to preserve and expand upon a large existing collection of African American art, photographs, books, historical documents and memorabilia. The center is located at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, where it creates gallery exhibits, educational programs and other cultural events.
Clunis moved to Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a few years ago for a job as director of academic partnerships and curator of African collections at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. She will commute to the Amistad Center from Longmeadow. She’s already “in Hartford all the time,” she said, meeting other arts leaders and getting to know the city.
“You can really feel the community,” she said. “I think Hartford is a really exciting city. It’s renewing cultural traditions, celebrating history. It’s fascinating, being from Jamaica myself and seeing all so many Jamaicans, Brazilians and Haitians.”
Clunis sees the center as “historical, an archive, a fresh resource for researchers. The location within the Wadsworth
has historical importance, but it is also a cultural center.”
A trained curator herself, Clunis will help plan exhibits at the center, especially long-term displays from its permanent collection and the Amistad’s collection concerning the history of African Americans in Connecticut. She wants to use the gallery to explore “the history of America and the contemporary reality of the African diaspora experience, primarily the social conditions.” She’s preparing an exhibit for the summer that lies “at the crossroads of art and history.”
“The collection is amazing,” Clunis said, “but it’s important to juxtapose archival materials with meaningful artworks.”
The center will also expand its learning modules and other educational materials for area students.
Clunis has many other ideas she hopes to start implementing soon, praising the Amistad Center’s board as being supportive of her plans to grow the institution.
“I’m here to stay,” she said. “I’m very committed. The Amistad’s mission and my mission are the same mission.”