Opening Reception:Black and White: Narratives of the Civil Rights Movement – Photographs from the George R. Rinhart Collection

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 15, 12-2:00 p.m.

This exhibition features forty-one black and white pictures from one of the largest private collections of American photography, presenting multi-faceted narratives of the Civil Rights era. They enable us to explore how visual images facilitated and documented political, cultural, and emotional dimensions of struggles for justice, equality, freedom, power, and humanity. They allow us to see barriers to these efforts embedded in the structures of American society. The stories begin in 1960 with college students occupying a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. They end with convicts protesting conditions at New York’s Attica Correctional Facility in 1971. In between are assorted scenes of unity, sorrow, militancy, compassion, brutality, determination, achievement, negotiation, celebration, and hate. Then and now, the images demand that we see and understand the protest, violence, triumph, and grief that defined “the movement.”

On View: February 10 – March 28, 2020 

* If you need special accomodations please contant Diorra Cole: dscole@syr.edu or call 315-442-2230 by Feb 8th.