NEW YORK: Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties

David Hammons, The Door (Admissions Office), 1969. Wood, acrylic sheet, and pigment construction, 79 x 48 x 15 inches. California African American Museum, Los Angeles, Collection of Friends, the Foundation of the California African American Museum. © David Hammons. Image via brooklynmuseum.org.

Curated by Teresa A. Carbone and Kellie Jones

March 7–July 6, 2014

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

Robert E. Blum Gallery, 1st Floor

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY

From the Brooklyn Museum web site:

Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties offers a focused look at painting, sculpture, graphics, and photography from a decade defined by social protest and American race relations. In observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this exhibition considers how sixty-six of the decade’s artists, including African Americans and some of their white, Latino, Asian American, Native American, and Caribbean contemporaries, used wide-ranging aesthetic approaches to address the struggle for racial justice.

The 1960s was a period of dramatic social and cultural upheaval, when artists aligned themselves with the massive campaign to end discrimination and bridged racial borders through creative work and acts of protest. Bringing activism to bear in gestural and geometric abstraction, assemblage, Minimalism, Pop imagery, and photography, these artists produced powerful works informed by the experience of inequality, conflict, and empowerment. In the process, they tested the political viability of their art, and originated subjects that spoke to resistance, self-definition, and blackness.

Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties is organized by Teresa A. Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Kellie Jones, Associate Professor, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Exhibit Link

Brooklyn Museum Takes On Pop Art and Protest in the Sixties