The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum will be displaying a collection meant to elicit emotions related to race-based injustice in America history.
Brian Washington’s “The Continual Struggle: The American Freedom Movement and the Seeds of Social Change,” will be on display Feb. 20-May 31 at the museum downtown.
The 23-piece exhibit, made with mixed charcoal on paper, recalls a time when people were willing to go into the streets to protest injustice and inequality, according to the artist’s website. The body of work documents the civil rights movement and America’s historical struggle against segregation and other forms of race-based injunctions.
“With this exhibit, I hope to elicit the raw emotions from the atrocities African Americans struggled with in years past and bring them to the forefront in today’s cultural lessons,” Washington said. “I want people who see ‘The Cultural Struggle’ to come away with a renewed sense of empathy and humility for those who came before us.”
The project’s 11-piece first edition was acquired in 2003 by the Smithsonian Institution and placed in the permanent collection of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Thirteen years later, the second edition opened at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas.
In honor of Black History Month, the Ford Museum will be free to the public on Feb. 22-23, and Feb.29-March 1.
Image courtesy Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum
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