Art/History

Whew! A busy week. Good thing MAD will be out of the District long enough to catch her breath.

Which is a good thing since my breath caught in my throat looking at the Road to Freedom exhibit presented by the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the International Gallery in the S. Dillon Ripley Center of the Smithsonian. A mouthful, eh? And a lotta links.

I got to see these Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968, with just one or two
people around me. Frequently at an exhibit you need to see the labels to know who and what are in pix; these resonate with my memories of the times and my gratitude for what the people in them did to help create the country I hope we are becoming. Among them are Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokely Carmichael, Floyd McKissick and Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. From the burning of a Greyhound bus in Anniston, Alabama to the culmination of the Selma-Montgomery March as well as the March on Washington and the Poor People's Campaign, they are indelibly imprinted in our history. The images are iconic and arrestingly (npi) lovely.


After 1968 - Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy is a smaller exhibit of photographs, digital video, prints and site-specific installations in the next gallery. Interesting to see these works by artists whose sensibilities were engendered by the work done by the people who led us on the Road to Freedom - in some cases years before the younger artists were even born. Nadine Robinson's sound sculpture Coronation Theme: Organon is composed of audio speakers arranged (in what appeared to me) in the form of an altar playing many kinds of sounds: choral, organ, shouting, water - you could hear it throughout the exhibit of photographs, adding a totally appropriate dimension that intensified the experience of both exhibits.

And so did a totally unanticipated interaction on the way out of the little gazebo-like ground level entrance to the Ripley Center. Well, maybe not so unanticipated; you know - MAD loves to talk to everyone. Saying good-bye to the security guard, I asked if she had seen the photos. Nodding yes she said, "And I lived them." A middle-schooler in Meridian, Mississippi during the Freedom Rider years she remembers the fear and the burning of the buses in the early 60s."What does it feel like to see those pictures now?" "Well", she said, "It's sad, but it doesn't do any good to look back - we just need to look ahead and do the best we can for each other. God loves me and if God can love the people who do evil in this world, I can love them too."

Thank you, Sarah Ashely. Thank you, everone who walked the Road to Freedom.