CADVC’s Project Also Receives “We the People” Designation from NEH
The Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture and its Senior Research Scholar, Dr. Maurice Berger, have received a $400,000 America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations: Implementation Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a forthcoming exhibition, website, and accompanying book, For All The World To See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Additionally, For All the World to See has been designated an NEH “We the People” project by the Endowment. The goal of the “We the People” initiative is to “encourage and strengthen the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture through the support of projects that explore significant events and themes in our nation’s history and culture and that advance knowledge of the principles that define America.” Dr. Berger is the project director, author, and curator of For All The World To See.
Symmes Gardner, director of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, observed: “The Center is tremendously excited to have received this major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. While it represents first and foremost a very substantial commitment to supporting For All The World To See, the grant also recognizes the importance of CADVC’s and Dr. Berger’s dedication to projects that seriously examine the issue of race in contemporary American culture.”
John Jeffries, dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, added: “I share the great excitement of Symmes Gardner and others in the CADVC about the NEH grant. Not only is this major award a signal recognition of the extraordinary quality of the work of Maurice Berger and the Center, but it is also testimony to the power of visual culture and a rigorous, creative multidisciplinary endeavor to illuminate important societal issues.”
The project—the first comprehensive exhibition and publication to look at the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States—is being organized in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. The exhibition will open in New York on May 12, 2010 at the International Center of Photography, with a film festival and public programming at the New York Public Library. The show will travel to the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution in June 2011 and on to museums across the United States as part of its national tour. It will conclude its tour at the Center for Art, Design, and Visual Culture in the fall of 2012. Yale University Press will publish the project’s extensively illustrated companion book, with a full-length text by Dr. Berger and a preface by the renowned writer, librettist, and novelist Thulani Davis.
