December 13 opening was attended by over 200 at the Smithsonian Anacostia Community Museum. This well-researched exhibition explores all aspects of what it was like to be aa citizen in the community and in the street during this pivotal period in the civil rights movement in Washington, DC. A four-minute exceprt of Assistant Director Sharon Reinckens' interview with me about the women's art movement in Washington in the 1970s and 80s runs continuously with interviews with Arturo Grifffiths founder of the Latin American Youth Center, and Lambda Rising Book Store founder Deacon Maccubbin. The show will be up through October 23, 2016.
… Washingtonians experienced their first meaningful presidential vote, elected a city council and mayor for the first time in a century, and became the largest majority African American city in the country. Freeways and suburbanization transformed the face of the city. New public housing accompanied the nation’s most ambitious urban renewal effort, and thousands of residents were displaced in the effort to build a modernist vision of the city. New trends in music, theatre, art, and dance transformed popular culture. Change was in the air, some of it unsettling and threatening. Against a national background of Lyndon Johnson’s “great society,” anti-war protests, black power and feminism, this exhibition focuses on events, people and challenges that transformed the city between 1963 and 1975.