many americas: art meets history
wilson museum at Southern vermont arts center

Inspired by Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror, the Many Americas exhibition and public programming takes as a premise that we do not share a common history and our divergent histories are the source of our troubled civic discourse. Each of the artworks in the exhibition uses history as their point of departure and speaks to present day issues. The artworks demonstrate the multiple, sometimes competing histories of America. The exhibition feature approximately two dozen artworks and installations and a variety of audience engagement approaches including texts, guided tours, and programs that draw out the issues raised by the artwork. In doing this, we seek to demonstrate how an art museum can become a public square where people can come together and talk about important civic issues.

To develop the exhibition, guest curator Ric Kasini Kadour undertook an eighteen-month-long research project funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts that examined the intersection of history and contemporary art.

How do we remember how the past felt? How is something as ethereal as a social climate made visible? What holds a history of a sense of peace and justice versus feelings of harassment and intimidation? These are not things easily accessed by historians, but they live in the minds and bodies of the people who experience them. Glenyse Thompson paints and collages first hand reports of incidents of racial harassment from the early 20th century as a way of inviting the viewer to consider the application of racial violence as a means of social control and repression that continues to this day. The artworks seen here are studies for a larger, more immersive installation.

All That Glitters Isn’t Gold 1 holds the story of civil rights workers Mendy Samstein and George Greene. On March 20, 1964, they were driving through Ruleville, Mississippi to visit Fannie Lou Hamer, who was running for Congress in the state’s second district. Their statement reports on how the police stopped their car, interrogated and arrested them, but not before one of the officers “pulled his gun and jabbed it repeatedly into George’s stomach.” The two were held in jail overnight and then fined $10 each for violating curfew even though the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1943 such laws were unconstitutional. When the men raised this point, the Mayor, who was charging them, said “that law has not reached here yet.” In All That Glitters Isn’t Gold 2, Lafayette Surney details the police harassment he and others faced upon arrival in Clarksdale, Mississippi in the Summer of 1964.