The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation welcomes social justice advocate, litigator, and nonprofit leader Ebony Howard as our incoming Executive Director, effective January 6, 2025.  Howard most recently served as Deputy Director for The Gault Center (formerly the National Juvenile Defender Center) in Washington, DC. Before that, she spent almost a decade in roles of increasing managerial and leadership responsibility at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, AL. As SPLC Associate Legal Director, Howard set the strategic direction for its 5 state offices in the deep South. She is a proud HBCU alum, earning her undergraduate degree from Howard University. She earned a law degree from Georgetown Law School.  We look forward to her leadership at this pivotal moment in our history. (See press release.)

The Alabama State Council on the Arts has awarded two grants, totalling $11,900, for the Wallace Center to work with the Town of Harpersville in 2025, creating an exciting collaboration for us. Aging through Poetry and Art: My History is Your History  enables poet Salaam Green and a visual artist to work with the Harpersville Senior Center participants on healing poetry and art and to produce a small exhibit/reception. Music and Arts Festival: A Partnership with the Town of Harpersville funds a large Harpersville Juneteenth celebration on our grounds. We are grateful to ASCA for their support.

Nell Gottlieb and Jennifer McCohnell, WCAR staff, will join Laura Anderson and Kathy Boswell of the Alabama Humanities Alliance (AHA) to discuss Alabama and the Healing History Initiative at the American Association for State and Local History Annual Conference to be held in Mobile Sept. 11-14. Our Roundtable, on Thursday Sept. 12, will include an experience of the AHA’s Past Forward, a thought-provoking activity to highlight the effect of policies on racial disparities today.

On August 10, 2024, co-founders Theo Perkins and Nell Gottlieb and Dr. Ashley Rogers, Executive Director of the Whitney Plantation, will participate on the panel “Whitney and Wallace: Reckoning with the Past through Architectural Reinterpretation” at the 2024 New Orleans Antiques Forum. The Forum is the annual conference of the The Historic New Orleans Collection. The Historic New Orleans Collection is a museum, research center, and publisher dedicated to the stewardship of the history and culture of New Orleans and the Gulf South.

The Wallace Center has contracted with Anise Search to manage our quest to hire a professional Executive Director. The new ED will succeed Nell Gottlieb, co-founder of The Wallace Center, as executive director, and Gottlieb will return to the Board of Directors.

Ayanna Grady-Hunt is the founder and managing director of Anise Search. You may contact her at ayanna@anisesearch.com. “Anise Search is a Black woman-owned firm committed to leveling racial and gender inequities in executive leadership. Identifying and centering change-agent leadership that has historically existed on the margins is fundamental to every executive search process.”

The Daniel Foundation of Alabama has awarded a grant of $30,000 for operational costs to the Wallace Center. This is especially helpful as the Center is currently undertaking a search for a new full time professional Executive Director. We are grateful to The Daniel Foundation for their support of our endeavors.

The Alabama Historical Society, the state historic preservation office, has awarded the Wallace Center $52,500 for accessibility improvements to the Wallace House. An outdoor lift will be installed so that visitors with mobility problems can access the first floor of the house. When this improvement is completed, any remaining funds will be put toward a heating and air conditioning system for the house. This grant addresses two key barriers to the use of the house, especially in the summer and winter. We are grateful to the Alabama Historical Commission and the state of Alabama for this significant contribution to open the Wallace House up to all.

Two major Alabama foundations have supported the building of the Artist Residency and Visitor Support Center located on the Wallace grounds. The Mike and Jillian Goodrich Foundation awarded $75,000 over FY 23 and 24 for construction and The Daniel Foundation of Alabama awarded $35,000 to be spent in FY 23. We are grateful to both these donors for their role in making this much needed buiding a reality. This building has been a game changer for the Wallace Center, enabling more people to visit the site and for short term artist residency stays.

On February 24, 2024, we officially opened our Artist Residency and Visitor Center. The building offers space for short term residency stays, a kitchen for small events catering, bathroom facilities to support the main house, and office and meeting space. We are grateful to our funders for the Artist Residency/Visitor Center: the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Mike and Gillian Goodrich Foundation, the Daniel Foundation of Alabama and generous private donors. The Hope Credit Union provided financing.  Our architects are Hester and Associates and Kelley Landscape Architects, and our contractor is Douthit Builders.

The Alabama Humanities Alliance has awarded $10,000 to the Wallace Center for an mixed media exhibit Emancipation and the Struggle to Make Home in the Wallace House in fall 2024. It will be accompanied by a public lecture at the Datcher History House on the antebellum period in Harpersville and then by a panel discussion The Origins of Alabama's Black Freedom Struggle, 1865-1890 at the Beth-El Civil Rights Experience. This programming is our first exhibit in a series of historical interpretations. and will inform the use of virtual and augmented reality in a fuller house interpretation.

For more about this historical period….

The Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham awarded $24,000 to the Wallace Center for “Preparing for Arts and Cultural Tourism at the Wallace House in Harpersville”. This grant allows us 1) to begin our planning process with the city of Harpersville to develop an arts and cultural tourism plan for the city and 2) to develop our experiential interpretation of the property for visitors to experience. These objectives are part of a long term project to have a multi-media experience for visitors to the house. We envison a future in which tourists visiting central Alabama come to understand the full reparative history of the Wallace plantation and reflect on what this experience means specifically to them. We also see that this boost to tourism will benefit the lives of local residents and economic development of the city.

This 2024 Fiscal Year, the Alabama State Council on the Arts has provided support to the Wallace Center for poet Salaam Green to provide a year of reparative poetry discussion and performance as she completes her volume Healing Harpersville for Pulley Press; for the opening and conversations around For Love, With Grief, by artist Elizabeth M. Webb with Salaam Green and the descendant community; and to develop an overarching conceptual design with plans for an experiential interpretation of the Wallace House and grounds.

Peter Datcher and Theo Perkins, two of our board members are featured in a panel discussion at the Rebecca J. Luker Stage, Center for the Arts, University of Montevallo, along with Elvie Schooley, founder of DRUM the program in Chilton County.  The program is free. Registration is not required.  Sunday, Feb. 4, 2-3:30 pm.

The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Arts at Auburn University is presenting the Auburn Forum for Southern Art and Culture on February 3 from 1:30 to 6:30.  Presenters include Elizabeth M. Webb (our resident artist), Lonnie Holley, Joy Harjo and Walter Hood. Registration required. 

Elizabeth Webb has an exhibit there, a bearing tree is a witness; an oak is an echoangel, from 1/1/24-6/17/24. (Shown: Film still from Boundary Exercise (On Perambulation)).

At the 2023 Homecoming, Klein Arts & Culture is celebrating its name change to The Wallace Center for Arts and Reconciliation. The name Klein was arbitrarily given to the house by the white Wallace family in the late 19th century when a name was required for the newly established postal address of the property. The Black Wallace family requested that the organization’s name be changed to reflect their name and the way they knew the house. In addition, the name encompasses the heritage of both the white and Black descendants and reflects the mission of our organization.

The Alabama Humanities Alliance will honor their 2023 Fellows, Drs. David Matthews and Imani Perry at a luncheon at the Grand Bohemian restaurant on October 23, 2023 at 11:30 am. Here’s the trailer for a short file on Healing History with interviews at the Wallace House.Following on, as part of AHA’s Healing History partnerships, the Wallace House and our work there will be featured in an on-site tour, with a bus departing at 3 pm from Birmingham. We are excited to be part of this AHA celebration. For further information and to purchase tickets, go here.

Congratulations to Kyle Whitmire for his Pulitzer Prize for his State of Denial series for Al.com. His story on Confederate Mansions discussed the mission of Klein Arts & Culture at the Wallace House as a counterpoint to mansions funded by the state that glorify the Lost Cause. Thank you, Kyle Whitmire!

Klein Arts & Culture is honored to be invited to participate in the 2023 Resnick Aspen Action Forum, an invitation-only gathering of values-based leaders from across the world. The theme of this year’s forum is Courage, Healing and Repair. We are eager to learn about like-minded projects and to become part of a broader network. KAC will be represented by our cofounders and board members, Theo Perkins, Nell Gottlieb, and Tom Hoynes.

The Wallace House was featured in a film, The Intersection of Story and Place, made by Mark Slagle of 1504 and presented to architects from New York City at the Howl, the AIA’s first multimedia forum to explore storytelling and filmmaking as powerful tools for architects to create a more compelling, equitable, and sustainable built environment. Slagle moderated the event that also included stories told by those attending about the use of story telling in their practices. Other 1504 projects highlighted were the Hotel Peter and Paul and the Beth El Civil Rights Experience. Watch the short film here.

The Alabama State Council for the Arts is increasing the sustainability of Klein Arts & Culture through two awards for staff salaries, totaling $27,800.   We have begun the recruiting process for a Program and Operations Director.  Operating funding is difficult to raise, and we appreciate ASCA’s continuing support of Klein Arts & Culture.