News + Events

Read about For All the World to See on The New Yorker "Photo Booth" blog in this excellent review and slide show by New Yorker visuals editor in chief, Elisabeth Biondi.

> Check Out The New Yorker Review and Slide Show

In conjunction with For All the World To See, the International Center of Photography and the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC are co-hosting this MUST see event.

Blackface Imagery and Its Answers: Stereotyping from the Early Civil Rights Era to the Obama Era

June 28, Monday, 7:00 pm
$5 non-members, free (members & students)

This event will take place at the International Center of Photography, 1130 Avenue of the Americas at 43rd Street.

Writer Thulani Davis will present a lecture on the cycles of call-and-response to generations of repeated, reworked and “reloaded” visual stereotypes of African Americans from their early days in print, regeneration in movies and new life on the internet. She will discuss how to “read” the images of objects designed to “serve” the viewer, such as common kitchen items depicting black faces, and show black responses to such imagery and how they in turn are recycled into new blackface. A global phenomenon since the turn of the 20th century, visual stereotypes have been used to promote colonization, immigration, products of all kinds, and the politics of inequality.

Thulani Davis is a journalist, playwright, and author of several books. Her most recent book, My Confederate Kinfolk, explores her black and white ancestors' lives around the time of the Civil War. Her other works include two novels, 1959 and Maker of Saints, several plays, and the scripts for the films Paid in Full and Maker of Saints. She has also written several award-winning PBS documentaries, and libretti for several operas. Davis has taught at Barnard College, Princeton University, and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She is a past recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Writers Award, a PEW Foundation National Theatre Artist Residency, and a Charles H. Revson Fellowship on the Future of New York City. She is a 1993 Grammy winner. Davis was educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University. She is currently doing research as a recipient of a fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York.

Register for this event online or call 212.857.0001.

The Find New York visitors' guide features For All the World to See as a must see exhibition of the summer. Check out pages 3 and 28 for more.

>Check out FATWTS in Find New York

The New York Photo Review urges its readers to make a point of seeing the "excellent" For All the World to See in this just published review.

>Read About FATWTS in The New York Photo Review

The Eye Magazine blog calls For All the World To See a "sophisticated exhibition and a sensory delight." Read on below.

> Read the review in Eye Magazine

Read this review of For All the World to See in Art Quips.

> Read the Review

Just out from IDIOM magazine: "Strange Fruit: Civil Rights and Visual Culture
at ICP," a very intelligent and incisive review of For All the World to See.

Here's an excerpt: "There are countless exhibitions, books, films, plays, and dances, like Alvin Ailey’s seminal Revelations, that rely on image to capture the civil rights movement in the United States, especially the bloody struggles of the late fifties, sixties and seventies. The particular intelligence of this exhibition is its focus on the relationship between the image and the struggle, not only at the micro-level of its evocative emotional power, but in the broader context of the media explosion of the mid-twentieth century. To this end, 'this exhibition of 230 objects and clips from television and film examines the extent to which the rise of the modern civil rights movement paralleled the birth of television and the popularity of picture magazines and other forms of visual mass media' . . . .”

> Read the Full Review