Current Exhibits
Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th – 18th CenturiesJanuary 10, 2025 - May 25, 2025
The History Museum of Mobile is excited to announce the next major exhibition, Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts, 13th – 18th Centuries, opening January 10, 2025. This engaging exhibition includes more than thirty-five works—some with elaborate gold leaf decoration and intricate ornament— from medieval Bibles, Prayer Books, Psalters, Books of Hours, Choir Books, Missals, Breviaries, and Lectionaries drawn from the collection of the Reading Public Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, who organized the exhibition. Examples of the materials—parchment, vellum, gold leaf, and minerals which were ground into pigments—used by artists before the age of printed books to create these extraordinary pages are also featured in the exhibit. The exhibition opens on January 10, 2025 and will be on view through May 25, 2025, sponsored locally by the Hearin-Chandler Foundation and WKRG TV-5.
Highlights include a lavish Bifolio from a Book of Hours with illuminations by Joachinus de Gigantibus de Rotenberg (German, active 1440s – 1490s), a Perugian Leaf from a Dominican Missal from the late fourteenth century, a large Bifolio of a Spanish Choir Book from the fifteenth century, a Hebrew scroll of the Book of Esther from the eighteenth century, and a leather-bound Italian Gradual containing the chants for the mass penned in the 1720s.
Most of the works date from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries and are created with ink on parchment or vellum (animal skin). French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, English, and German examples will be included in the exhibition. Additionally, non-Western sheets, including a sumptuous seventeenth-century leaf from the Koran and Shahnameh (the illustrated Persian Book of Kings) pages from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nearly all of the sheets came to the Reading Public Museum through Otto Ege, a well-known Cleveland-area bookseller and specialist who was born in Reading, Pennsylvania.
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Painted Pages: Illuminated Manuscripts 13th - 18th Centuries is organized by the Reading Public Museum, Reading, Pennsylvania.
Clotilda: The Exhibition at Africatown Heritage HouseJuly 08, 2023 - May 31, 2028
In March 2020, the History Museum of Mobile announced a partnership with the Alabama Historical Commission, Mobile County Commission, and the City of Mobile to create a landmark exhibition at the under-construction Africatown Heritage House. Located in the heart of historic Africatown, the Heritage House is adjacent to the Mobile County Training School and the Robert L. Hope Community Center. The History Museum of Mobile operates Africatown Heritage House as a fourth museum site, which is located at 2465 Winbush St. Mobile, AL 36610.
Clotilda: The Exhibition covers the story of the Clotilda with a special focus on the people of the story - their individuality, their perseverance, and the extraordinary community they established. The exhibition tells the story of the 110 remarkable men, women and children, from their West African beginnings, to their enslavement, to their settlement of Africatown, and finally the discovery of the sunken schooner, all through a combination of interpretive text panels, documents, and artifacts. The pieces of the Clotilda that have been recovered from the site of the wreck are on display in the exhibition, on loan from the Alabama Historical Commission. The exhibition was curated, developed, and designed in conjunction with the local community and the wider descendent community, and in consultation with experts around the country.
The exhibition itself –about 2,500 square feet – is a rich, multi-sensory space, dense with compelling stories and images. Woven into the larger story, visitors can expect to see and hear lots of primary source reports and stories of individuals: their histories, their families, their resilient spirit. Inside the exhibition, visitors can expect a dramatic space and a step-by-step chronology from the story’s West African origins through the founding and development of Africatown. Towards the end of the exhibition, visitors will emerge into a space that looks towards the future of Africatown and invites visitors to respond to what they have seen.
The Mobile County Commission and the City of Mobile have funded the construction of the Africatown Heritage House building, and the History Museum of Mobile curated, constructed, and funded the exhibition.