Reggie & Celeste Hodges Donate African Collection to Museums

Hello! We’re Reggie & Celeste Hodges, former Peace Corps Volunteers who are donating our West African carvings, textiles, and photos to museums. Fifty-some years ago we served in Sierra Leone, then continued working in Africa. Today we share our African collection with museums, doing our part to fulfill the Peace Corps Third Goal of increasing Americans’ understanding of other peoples and cultures.

We created this website to keep track of our donations. Please follow along with us. Museums that have accepted our artworks are named below.

Museums that Have Accepted Artworks
from the Hodges Collection

CARVINGS and TEXTILES

The University Galleries of North Carolina A&T State University

NCA&T accepted 65 items. This donation is particularly meaningful to us since Reggie’s dad, SJ Hodges II, was a proud A&T alum, class of 1939.

The Wellington B. Gray Gallery at East Carolina University (ECU)

ECU accepted 150 artworks. An exhibit, Selections from the Celeste and Reginald Hodges Collection: African art, from traditional to modern, was on display August 14-September 30, 2023.

Gregg Museum of Art & Design at NC State University
The Gregg accepted 41 textiles, carvings, and other items, including the Senufu mud cloth at left. Our Bundu masks are on display and two of our textiles are part of the current exhibit Material Messages: The Tales That Textiles Tell.


North Carolina Museum of Art
NCMA accepted 24 pieces.

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
The Nasher accepted 27 pieces, including the falui mask at left. A Wolof ngoni (guitar) was displayed as part of the Cosmic Rhythm Vibrations exhibit.

Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill
The Ackland accepted ten artworks, including the two Bundu masks at left.


Ackland Museum Store at UNC-Chapel Hill
In conjunction with the Ackland’s 2022 exhibit Peace, Power & Prestige: Metal Arts in Africa, we donated a number of metal artworks from our collection for the museum store to sell, with proceeds to benefit the museum.


University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA)
UMMA accepted three artworks from our collection. They will be kept on the UMich campus, where John F Kennedy first spoke of his idea of the Peace Corps while addressing an enthusiastic student audience at 2:00 AM on October 14, 1960.


Museum of the Peace Corps Experience (MPCE)
The MPCE accepted fifteen cultural items and 25 drawings Reggie created during his Peace Corps service.

PHOTOGRAPHS

John Hope Franklin Research Center at the David M Rubenstein Library at Duke University

We’re honored that the John Hope Franklin Center asked to have the cultural photos that we took, and we recently turned over all 550 of our Sierra Leone prints, slides, and negatives. We digitized the entire collection and also turned over the digital versions. We and Duke plan to make many of the digital versions publicly available online. See our gallery of Village Life in Sierra Leone.

Comments? Email us at reggieceleste@gmail.com