The NEH on the Road Version of FATWTS on the NEH Webite
Read this important article about the NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See on the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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Read this important article about the NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See on the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
2012-13 UMBC For All the World to See Humanities Forum Events
The 2012-13 Humanities Forum series sponsored by The James T. and Virginia M. Dresher Center for the Humanities at UMBC will feature several events in conjunction with For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, on view at the Center for art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC from 15 Nov. 2012 to 10 March 2013
28 Nov. 2012 4 p.m. Albin O. Kuhn Library Gallery
Collecting, Preserving, and Interpreting African American History and Culture
Panelists: Kinshasha Holman Conwill, National Museum of African American History and Culture, Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland, Moira Hinderer, Afro American Newspaper Archive, Moderator: Denise Meringolo, UMBC
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5 Dec. 2012 4 p.m. Proscenium Theater
The Civil Rights Movement from the Ground Up
Learn about the unsung young men and women who were at the forefront of the civil rights movement, in particular those in SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which grew out of the 1960 sit ins by African-American college students. Julian Bond, one of the founders of SNCC and later chairman of the NAACP, Andrew Lewis, the author of The Shadows of Youth: The Story of the Civil Rights Generation, and UMBC President Freeman Hrabowski, who participated in the Birmingham Children’s March of 1963, will discuss the crucial--often under-appreciated--role youth and college students played in the movement. Moderated by Taylor Branch.
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13 February 2013 4 p.m. Library
Panel Discussion: Race and the Civil Rights Movement in Music and the Media
Derek Musgrove, UMBC’s History Department, Michelle Scott, UMBC’s History Department, David Zurawik (Baltimore Sun and WYPR)
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27 February 2013 7 p.m. Location TBA
Thulani Davis: Blackface: From the Age of Civil Rights to the Age of Obama
An Oral History, Performance and Digital Humanities Outreach Project of the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC
For All the World to Hear: Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights, is a dynamic humanities project in which approximately a dozen senior citizens from the Baltimore area will tell, write, perform and digitally publish personal stories about their involvement with the struggle for civil rights.
The project brings diverse seniors together for a series of oral history interviews under the guidance of oral historian, Harriet Lynn, who uses their written accounts to create a script that the participants will perform at venues including museums, libraries, parks and college campuses from November 2012 - February 2013. Audiences include area K-12 school children, who will participate in talk backs with the performers following each live presentation, resulting in rich, first-person history lessons for the students.
In the spring of 2013, the same group of seniors will work with University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) students who will help them to realize their stories in a digital video format. The final results will be published on UMBC’s digital storytelling site (umbc.edu/stories) and distributed online via iTunes U. A short documentary film will record the entire program beginning with their first meeting in September 2012 and ending in May 2013 with the web launch of the digital stories.
For All the World to Hear: Stories from the Struggle for Civil Rights is a community outreach program of the Center for Art, Design & Visual Culture (CADVC) at UMBC. It is organized by Sandra Abbott, CADVC’s curator of collections and outreach in collaboration with Harriet Lynn, producer/artistic director of Heritage Theatre Artists’ Consortium, and in association with UMBC’s New Media Center. The program is supported in part by the Maryland Humanities Council. Program partners include Eating Together in Baltimore, the Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Mosaic Center, UMBC, the Reginald F. Lewis, Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Senior Citizen Division of Baltimore City Recreation and Parks. Media partners include Beacon Press, Senior Digest, Baltimore County, Urbanite Magazine, and WYPR. For all the World to Hear is inspired by the concurrent CADVC project, For All The World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights, curated by Dr. Maurice Berger, CADVC’s Research Professor and Chief Curator. Learn more below or at foralltheworldtosee.org.
The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture is a non-profit organization dedicated to organizing comprehensive exhibitions, the publication of catalogs, CDs, DVDs, and books on the arts, and educational and community outreach projects.
This project was made possible by a grant from the Maryland Humanities Council, through support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Maryland Humanities Council.
Read these excellent reviews of the NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See in Louisiana newspapers and blogs!
> Read the newest review of For All the World to See in The Daily Comet
> Read this earlier review in the Daily Comet
> Read about FATWTS in HOUMA TODAY
Here is the updated schedule for the NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See:
April 06, 2012 - May 25, 2012 (Closed)
Wyandotte County Historical Museum
Bonner Springs, KS
July 16, 2012 - October 20, 2012
Terrebonne Parish Library
Houma, LA
November 10, 2012 - January 07, 2013
Kansas African American Museum
Wichita, KS
January 28, 2013 - March 16, 2013
William F. Laman Public Library
North Little Rock, AR
April 6, 2013 - May 25, 2013
Chippewa Valley Museum
Eau Claire, WI
June 16, 2013 - August 11, 2013
Oregon Historical Society
Portland, OR
September 01, 2013 - October 20, 2013
Bessie Smith Cultural Center
Chattanooga, TN
November 10, 2013 - January 07, 2014
[Refurbishment]
Kansas City, MO
January 28, 2014 - March 16, 2014
University of Texas at San Antonio
San Antonio, TX
April 06, 2014 - May 25, 2014
Date on Hold
June 16, 2014 - August 11, 2014
Tunica Museum
Tunica, MS
September 01, 2014 - October 20, 2014
Mercer Museum
Doylestown, PA
November 10, 2014 - January 7, 2015
Date on Hold
January 28, 2015 - March 16, 2015
Bell County Museum
Belton, TX
April 06, 2015 - May 25, 2015
Stearns History Museum
St. Cloud, MN
June 16, 2015 - August 11, 2015
Date on Hold
September 01, 2015 - October 20, 2015
Branigan Cultural Center
Las Cruces, NM
November 10, 2015 - January 07, 2016
Cape Fear Museum
Wilmington, NC
January 28, 2016 - March 16, 2016
Alexandria Black History Museum
Alexandria, VA
April 6, 2016 - May 25, 2016
Kean University
Union, NJ
June 16, 2016 - August 11, 2016
Date on Hold
September 01, 2016 - October 20, 2016
Eastern Illinois University
Charleston, IL
November 10, 2016 - January 07, 2017
West Baton Rouge Museum
West Baton Rouge, LA
January 28, 2017 - March 16, 2017
Texarkana Regional Arts & Humanities Council
Texarkana, TX
The NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See just opened at its next venue: Terrebonne Parish Main Library in Houma, Louisiana. It's up until 20 October 2012!
NEH on the Road version For All the World to See on NPR: Central Standard Time show on KCUR, Kansas City!
> Click here to Listen to NPR coverage of NEH on the Road/FATWTS
For those of our visitors in the New York City area, please drop by the Whitney Museum of American Art from 9 to 13 May and see For All the World to See curator, Maurice Berger's video, Threshold, which will be projected continuously during the residency--BLEED--curated for the Whitney Biennial by Alicia Hall Moran and Jason Moran. The Whitney writes: "BLEED will present five days of live music, exploring the power of performance to cross barriers and challenge assumptions, as their title, BLEED, suggests. With a line-up of concerts and events spanning music, dance, theater, and literature, as well as an exhibition of past video collaborations with Glenn Ligon, Joan Jonas, Kara Walker, and Simone Leigh and Liz Magic Laser—and a new video by the cultural historian Maurice Berger—BLEED is a celebration of surprising synergy across the visual arts and music."
Here is more about Threshold from the Whitney press release:
"Over the past seventeen years, the cultural historian Maurice Berger has produced cinematic 'culture stories,' syncopated compilations of historic clips from American film and television that explore issues of identity and self-representation. Threshold is a continuum of images from popular culture produced during the period of or about the historic civil rights movement. It riffs on the crossing of thresholds—walking through doors, boarding trains and buses, entering cars, gliding across stages, stepping up to podiums, and even the imagined passage from Earth to heaven—that have defined the voice, place, and aspirations of a people. The story it tells is one of self-possession and triumph: the epic passage across thresholds that, in the context of this film, serve as metaphors of the barriers, glass ceilings, and restrictions then imposed on African Americans."
> For more on BLEED and the full schedule of events, Click Here
Read more about For All the World to See/NEH on the Road at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum in the Kansas City Studio!
We will be updating press on the NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See in its first venue, the Wyandotte County Historical Museum in Bonner Springs, Kansas.
Read this outstanding cover story on the NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See in the Sunday Magazine of the Kansas City Star. The show opens at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum in Bonner Springs, KS (right outside of KC) on 9 April.
Here is our update for the full version of For All the World to See!
Full Version of FATWTS:
Memphis: National Civil Rights Museum
12 January through 20 August 2012
> National Civil Rights Museum website
Baltimore: Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
15 November 2012 to 10 March 2013
> FATWTS at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture
Andover, Massachusetts: Addison Gallery of American Art
April to July 2013
Here are several articles from local newspapers in Kansas City, KS on the upcoming premiere of the NEH on the Road version of For All the World to See at the Wyandotte County Historical Museum in April 2012!
> Read about NEH on the Road in Wyandotte Daily News
Want to learn all about For All the World to See all on one web page? Check out this informative Fact Page from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)--chock full of links to articles and press, TV and radio stories, and updates on the national and NEH on the Road tours of the exhibition. An outstanding source for information on FATWTS!
Read all about it: For All the World to See in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, and MSNBC Iternaries plus an outstanding feature on the NEH on the Road version of the exhibition at its first venue--the Wyandotte County Historical Museum, Bonner Springs, Kansas (starting 6 April 2012)--in the Kansas City Kansan!
> Read About FATWTS in the Washington Post
> Read about FATWTS on The Huffington Post
> Read About FATWTS on MSNBC-Itineraries
>Read about FATWTS/NEH on the Road in the Kansas City Kansan
In celebration of Black History Month, the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grantees pay tribute to the contributions of African Americans to our nation and its history with numerous events and cultural programs. Click on below for coverage of NEH-supported events, exhibitions, and resources focusing on African American history and culture taking place around the country this February--lists that feature For All the World to See!
> Click Here for the NEH Black History Month Recommendations
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Also, for teachers or museum educators: The National Endowment for the Humanities recommends the For All the World to See website as an important Black History Month teaching resource!
Attention teachers: For All the World to See is now part of the "Oh Freedom" Teacher Bibliography--Teaching African American Civil Rights Through American Art at the Smithsonian! Learn more about the teaching of civil rights through the For All the World to See online exhibition and website.
By Maurice Berger, For All the World to See project director and curator
In a series of short essays published over the next year, I will examine recent efforts by scholars, artists, writers, and producers to rethink the visual culture of the civil rights movement. First up: my take on the set of exceptionally entertaining DVDs of Motown acts on The Ed Sullivan Show, produced by SOFA Entertainment. In the 1960s, the Sullivan show regularly booked African American artists from a then small record company from Detroit founded by Berry Gordy Jr. in 1960--Motown--introducing the nation to most of the company’s acts and helping to turn Motown into a national institution. One compilation from the set—Motown Gold from The Ed Sullivan Show—presents scores of thrilling performances, from such notable singers and groups as The Supremes, Four Tops, Gladys Night and the Pips, The Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Stevie Wonder, and the Temptations. Two more discs—The Best of the Temptations and The Best of the Supremes—pay homage to popular Motown acts who appeared regularly on the program. Collectively, the DVD collection offers a sustained picture of a group of entertainers who profoundly influenced American popular culture of the 1960s.
In the context of For All the World to See and its soon to open NEH on the Road iteration—both exhibitions include a section of 21-historic clips of African American performers on the Sullivan program—the Motown DVDs help us to understand, while simultaneously entertaining us, the vital role played by African American artists, as well as Ed Sullivan himself, in advancing the cause of civil rights. If prime-time dramas and situation comedies of the civil rights era rarely featured African-American actors or subject matter, The Ed Sullivan Show, as well as several other groundbreaking variety programs of the period, actively showcased black acts. Sullivan’s weekly variety hour, broadcast live on Sunday evening, was a civil rights trailblazer, granting unprecedented visibility to African-American entertainers who were often invisible in mainstream popular culture.
The most successful variety-hour on American television, the Sullivan show introduced a generation of Americans to a broad array of artists. Despite ongoing battles with conservative sponsors, Sullivan, the show’s producer and host, created an early and reliable forum for African-American singers, actors, and comedians. By showing black and white performers interacting as equals, and by bringing these entertainers into the homes of millions of Americans on a weekly basis, the program, as well as Sullivan himself, set an example of racial acceptance and integration, not just for the entertainment industry but for the nation at large.
In the end, The Ed Sullivan Show advanced the cause of civil rights by enfranchising African American performers, from its inception in 1948 to its last show in 1971. For black viewers, such performances were a source of pride and mainstream validation. For all viewers, these shows demonstrated the promise and desirability of integration by presenting black and white professionals interacting as equals. As powerfully as any contemporary exploration of black entertainers in the civil rights era, SOFA Entertainment’s Motown collection foregrounds this relatively under-represented aspect of civil rights history—reminding us of the power of gifted African American artists, a determined producer-host, and television itself, a relatively young medium at the time, to change the world.
Next up: scholar Christine Acham's groundbreaking study, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
For All the World to See now has a sixth venue for its full-sized version: the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, 12 January 2012 through 20 August 2012!
> Read About FATWTS on the National Civil Rights Museum website
BET--Black Entertainment Television--recommends For All the World to See as the place to go an important African American cultural experience!
The For All the Word to See website has just been selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities for its EDSITEment educational initiative! EDSITEment websites have been approved and recommended for use in the classroom by the NEH as the "best of the humanities on the web."
For All the World to See is now part of a Smithsonian-wide conversation on race! For more, read this piece in Anthropology News--"Washington Talks About Race" by Joslyn Osten.
Smithsonian Magazine's profile of For All the World to See curator, Prof. Maurice Berger, is now online, along with a slide show of materials in the exhibition!
Washington DC's renowned Arena Stage recommends a visit to For All the World to See in its Stage Banter blog! The exhibition remains at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History through 27 November 2011.
Event at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History: Guided tours of For All the World to See on Tuesday, 30 August 2011. From Smithsonian Magazine: "Members of the Civil Rights movement made heavy use of visual imagery in spreading awareness of their cause, from television to movies, magazines, newspapers, and posters. Experience For All the World to See with a firsthand docent-guided tour to get a fuller understanding of this critical period through this fascinating lens. Free. 10 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. African American History and Culture Museum.
Read this excellent article on For All the World to See by Clarence V. Reynolds in The Network Journal.
Interested in having For All the World to See come to your community? Starting in April 2012, a smaller, lower security version of the exhibition will begin its NEH on the Road tour. The rental fee is extraordinarily low and the project is open to booking through March 2017. And each venue receives at $1,000 programing grant from the NEH. So explore the possibility of bringing For All the World to See to your town.
> Click Here For Details About Bringing FATWTS To Your Community
Read about For All the World to See in these media outlets!
> For All the World to See on the "Around the Mall" blog of Smithsonian Magazine.
> For All the World to See on goSmithsonian
> For All the World to See on the Multi-Literacy Revolution website
> For All the World To See on 9 AM NEWS, the Romanian News Service
> For All the World to See on DC Metro Arts
> For All the World to See in the Toonari Post
> Akacocolopez Summer Reading List!
> For All the World to See in the Washington City Paper
> Read about FATWTS as Recommended By CivicSource: A Civic Engagement Web Portal.
> The Pink Line Project selects For All the World to See as the exhibition to see in DC!
> Read the Luncheon of the Museum Goer Review of For All the World to See>
Curious-er recommends that parents take their children to see For All the Word to See at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History . . . calling it "a wonderful education for your child beaten down by pablum about Martin Luther King."
> Read the Review from Curious-er
The Yale University Press For All the World to See companion book was recently named a finalist for the Benjamin Hooks National Book Award. Read about it in the Today's Hooks newsletter!
Read the article and view the slide show about For All the World to See on CNN!
Read this review of For All the World to See in the Washington DC Examiner.
Read about For All the World to See in this excellent article by Stephen Deusner of the Washington Express, the daily print/online newspaper published by the Washington Post.
[Photo by Jeff Tackett]
For All the World to See, as advertised on DC Metro trains and buses!
Read about For All the World to See on Substance & Style/DC!
Read about For All the World to See at The Smithsonian in this article by the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Trymaine Lee. A Must read!
Read About For All the World to See at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in the Washington Post!
For All the World to See opens next week at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History! It runs from 10 June through 27 November 2011.
Yet another honor! The companion book of For All the World to See was named as a finalist for the National Book Award of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change of the University of Memphis. The award recognizes a publication that best advances an understanding of the American civil rights movement and its legacy.
NEH on the Road officially announces for For All the World to See as the next exhibition on their roster. First venue opening in April 2012 (while the "big" version continues its tour).
The American Library Association has just named the companion book for For All the World to See a Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2010, in the category of Art and Architecture!
Here is Choice's Full Citation:
Berger, Maurice. For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights. Yale/Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland Baltimore County/National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian, 2010. 207p index afp; ISBN 9780300121315, $39.95. Outstanding Title! Reviewed in 2010sep CHOICE.
In this compelling, insightful book, cultural historian and art critic Berger (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) underscores the myriad ways that images in advertising, film, photojournalism, and television fashioned and fortified the modern civil rights movement from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s. Echoing cultural critic bell hooks's assertion that the struggle for black liberation was a battle for both visual and political representation, Berger demonstrates how civil rights leaders fought to replace century-old caricatures of doting mammies, entertaining dandies, and exotic primitives with positive portrayals of modern, self-assured, and successful citizens. Analyzing representations of race in the news and entertainment industries, Berger shows how black leaders orchestrated media events to rouse African Americans to action and compel European Americans to confront the realities of racism. He underscores how popular film and television programs both supported and undermined these aims. Berger's incisive examination into the visual culture of American race relations will cause readers to look anew--quite literally--at the civil rights movement and to grasp the power of images to transform American life. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. -- K. A. Schwain, University of Missouri--Columbia
