Macon Magazine

October/November 2025 | maconmagazine.com 37 ince 2002, Jeff Bruce has served as curator of Macon's Tubman Museum, shaping exhibitions that tell powerful, o en overlooked stories of Black history and culture. In this conversation, Bruce reflects on his unexpected path into museum work, the challenges of staying true to the Tubman's mission, and the exhibits that have le the deepest mark. With candor and conviction, he shares why preserving truth matters (even uncomfortable truths), and how the community can help sustain it. Tell me a little about yourself. I've been here in Macon since 2002. I came here to be the curator at the Tubman Museum. I came from another museum up in Virginia that was a university museum. It had an African collection, a Native American art collection, Asian Pacific Islands collections, and African American art. It was a multicultural institution, and it was on a campus. Here in Macon, it's a freestanding one. Outside of this, I'm a collector, which makes sense since I work in a museum. I collect a variety of things – ceramics, comics, pocketknives, fountain pens. A pretty quiet, simple life. What inspired you to work in museums? It was entirely by accident. I was an English major, but I wasn't interested in teaching. I was interested in creative writing and film. My plan was to go to graduate school, but it would [have been] film school. That didn't happen. I went home to Atlanta and started trying to find work. I had a bunch of odd jobs and eventually got an "adult job" with the Internal Revenue Service. So I've gotten J e f f B r u c e H E R O E S A M O N G U S S T h e l o n g t i m e c u ra to r o f t h e Tu b m a n M u s e u m p u t s t r u t h te l l i n g a t t h e fo r e f r o n t o f h i s h a n d c ra f te d ex h i b i t s INTERVIEW BY LAURA ASHLYN PRIDGEN | PHOTO BY MATT ODOM academic things, writing papers, talking about art, and drinking coffee. Ours was very hands-on, like li this, take this over there, clean this out, paint this. I got a bottom-up education in museums, and I liked it. I just kind of fell into it, and it turned out to be something I had an aptitude for. Which exhibits at the Tubman have made the biggest impression? All of them have. We create our own exhibits. A lot of institutions borrow shows, there's all sorts of traveling exhibits out there, but we don't do that. We come up with the ideas and develop everything ourselves, so all of them are a labor of love for us. We did two Afrofuturism exhibits back in the 2010s. It was called "Riffing on the real: Afrofuturism in the arts." They brought these disparate kinds of African American expressions together— paintings, sculpture, illustration, photography, masquerade, comics, album cover art. In the seventies with people like P-Funk, they had whole comics and video with their albums. Those were really cool and popular. Most recently, the Igbo Landing exhibit has been huge for us. We were the first institution to do an exhibit about that story. It was one of the earliest examples of slave resistance in the U.S., and it happened on St. Simons Island. We wanted to hire a photographer to go down and take really cool pictures, but couldn't afford it. The this horrible job that just destroys my soul, and everything good – or potentially good – inside of me is just withering and dying as I talk on the phone to these people about their taxes. A friend called me up and said, "Hey, there's this program for museums. It's run by the history department, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and they have all this money that's just sitting there. They just don't have any students. If you were to come and get in, you could get all this money for graduate school." I had never thought about museum work. As part of our freshman orientation, they took us to the museum. They showed us these masks. I thought, well, this is interesting. But I didn't go back until my senior year in college. I would walk by the building every day, almost, so I started going in, and I would see the exhibits. It was free. This is cool. I like this that we have this here. But that was as far as it went. But when this guy says, "Hey, you go to grad school for free," I was like, I want grad school for free. I like that museum. I'll go. I got in, and of course, everything that he had said about money was just a lie. I can't pay for this, but schools have work-study. I worked 20 hours a week in the museum. It was great experience because three or four of us all came in at the same time – three 22-year-old men who could li all this heavy stuff. We did everything. You think of museum work as "We come up with the ideas and develop everything ourselves, so all of them are a labor of love for us."

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