Meet the Collector: Marques Redd On Stewardship, Memory and Collecting Beyond Value
Established in Macon, Georgia, in 1990, Melgenia and Vernon Redd’s Miracles Art Gallery would go on to house one of the world’s most important collections of Black art. “By day, my parents worked as telecommunications engineers, immersed in blueprints, cables and network grids. By night and on weekends, they were building an institution,” artist Marques Redd tells Observer, meditating on his parents’ commitment to championing and preserving talent. “The collection has been foundational to my development as an artist. It formed the ground of my seeing long before I had language for what art could do.”
Today, Marques is the collection’s custodian, along with his sister and fellow artist, Marquita Sams. Understandably, their artwork is steeped in the collection’s themes. “Growing up, I was surrounded not just by art, but by thoughtful, critical reflection on art,” Marques explains. “Particularly the idea that Black visual culture carried history, philosophy and spiritual instruction.”
With the gallery still in the planning stages, Melgenia and Vernon worked their day jobs while building an art collection from the ground up and taking artworks into the community. “They turned our attic into a framing studio, forged lasting relationships with artists and gave workshops in school auditoriums and public spaces,” Marques says. “They cut glass late into the night so the work could be seen properly the next day.” He grew up in the presence of pieces from Romare Bearden, praised as “the nation’s foremost collagist” by the New York Times when he died in 1988; the late Jacob Lawrence (a key member of the Harlem Renaissance movement who described his approach to painting and printmaking as “dynamic Cubism”); and contemporary artists Kathleen Atkins Wilson, Larry Ponch Brown and Joseph Holston. “Jacob Lawrence’s Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture series introduced me to history as movement, struggle and form. With its figures straining against what I now understand as the Plantation Matrix.” Born into slavery in Haiti in 1743, Toussaint L’Ouverture went on to lead the Haitian Revolution against French colonial rule, the first successful campaign to abolish slavery in modern history.
Flooding, coupled with Vernon’s deteriorating health, forced the gallery’s closure in the late 1990s, and the collection was stored away in the Redd family home. The COVID lockdown, however, gave Marques the time to work on reintroducing the collection to the public. He began digitizing the artworks, and under the aegis of Rainbow Serpent, the multidisciplinary arts nonprofit he co-founded with Nigerian-American artist Mikael Owunna, he curated pieces from the collection for Juneteenth festivals in Pittsburgh and Macon. In 2024, artworks from the Redd Family Collection appeared in the “Pioneers of Purpose” exhibition at Macon’s Douglass Theatre and the Tubman African American Museum’s exhibition “The
Along with serving as the organizational backbone for the Redd Family Collection, Rainbow Serpent supports the advancement of Black LGBTQ+ culture at the intersection of African cosmologies, multimedia art and emerging technologies. Marques is working on a biographical book in which he unpicks how the collection has shaped his work. “Among the more than 800 objects my parents assembled were pieces that planted deep seeds,” he says. “The Nguni shields that lined the walls were early lessons in what it meant to be a warrior for Black culture. Dogon masks were fragments of a cosmology I would later enter fully, and images of Tutankhamun offered my first glimpses of an ancient Egyptian current that now anchors much of my work. Woven cloths with Adinkra and Nsibidi symbols were codes of thought, justice, divination and remembrance that I didn’t yet understand, but I kind of knew they were using a grammar older than English.”
The Redd Family Collection continues to grow. “I’m in constant dialogue with a growing international community of artists across the U.S., Brazil, the U.K., Nigeria and Romania,” Marques says. “I’ve been supporting and collecting artists whose practices expand the lineage of the Black art my parents championed, while reflecting our movement’s contemporary spiritual, political and aesthetic concerns. Artists I’m adding to the collection include Devan Shimoyama, Ajamu X and Granville Carroll, among others. The work of these artists is deeply invested in Black queer life, embodiment, intimacy and myth-making.”
There is more to come, with Marques and Marquita brainstorming new paths of accessibility. “We plan to continue presenting the work through museum exhibitions and shows at universities, alongside community-based events that stay true to the collection’s original spirit of meeting people where they are,” he says. “We’re also expanding access through digital platforms. We’re developing a metaverse experience that allows people to encounter works from the collection online.” Their goal is to ensure the collection functions as a living, evolving resource for dialogue and cultural connection—one that circulates locally and globally.
Marques also hopes the collection will teach others about the ongoing hard work required to build culture. “I want people to understand that invisible, unglamorous, deeply committed labor is how culture is sustained,” he concludes. “This collection really transcends a group of objects; it’s a record of devotion, sacrifice and belief in the necessity of Black art. I hope it teaches others that institutions don’t only come from wealth or prestige. They can be built through love, rigor and an unwavering commitment to making space for beauty and collective memory.”