With 12 months of conservation work now complete, the historic Talladega Murals will be presented to a national audience for the first time in a new exhibition – “Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College ” – on view at the High Museum of Art June 9 to Sept. 2.

The Museum and College announced dates and locations for several U.S. museums set to share the murals with audiences through 2015.Following the High exhibition, the murals will travel to the African American Museum in Dallas Oct. 6 to Feb. 28, 2013.

In March 2011, the High Museum of Art and Talladega College in Alabama began a five-year collaborative project to restore, research and exhibit Hale Aspacio Woodruff’s renowned Talladega murals. Commissioned in 1938 to commemorate the 1867 founding of Talladega College and celebrate its success as one of the nation’s first all-black colleges, the murals have been continuously viewed on campus since their installation in the lobby of Savery Library.

Comprising six monumental canvases arranged in two cycles of three, the vibrant murals portray heroic efforts to resist slavery as well as moments in the history of the college, which opened in 1867 to serve the educational needs of a new population of freed slaves.

The exhibition at the High Museum of Art will include works that span a good part of Woodruff’s early career with a particular focus on his important work as a muralist. In addition to the Talladega murals and studies, this exhibition will feature examples of Woodruff’s other mural commissions, as well as smaller-scale paintings he made while in Mexico, where he went in 1936 to study mural painting with Diego Rivera.

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