The Herndon Gallery opens an historic exhibition of iconic documentary photography, “Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement” on Friday, June 5 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm. The evening’s public reception includes live performances by local artists and activists involved in the #BlackLivesMatter and Justice for John Crawford movements. The Gallery will also present an artist talk with Danny Lyon via Skype on Thursday, July 16 from 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm.
The reception on Friday, June 5 will feature slam and performance poets, John Booth, Furaha Henry-Jones and G. Scott Jones, performing powerful spoken word pieces, while visual artist and citizen activist, Migiwa Orima, makes screen prints in the gallery. Migiwa’s protest banners visually connect the local protest movements to the national movement. Between marches, these banners will reside in the Herndon Gallery.
The exhibition also features the archival slide montage known as The Gegner Incident, created by Brian Springer. It includes archival newspaper clippings and photographs of a local civil rights citizen protest around racism in a local barbershop in Yellow Springs in the 1950s.
Antioch College and the Herndon Gallery will also host a special reception and conversation on Friday, June 19 from 1:00 pm to 3:00 pm with David Goodman ’69 and Steve Schwerner ’60 (Brothers of Andrew Goodman and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, who along with James Earl Chaney were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Miss. during the Freedom
Summer campaign in 1964). Artist Danny Lyon will also be present for a book signing in the Gallery following Goodman and Schwerner’s reflections. The second publishing of Lyon’s out of print memoir was made possible through the generosity of Antioch College Trustee David Goodman and The Andrew Goodman Foundation. As part of Antioch’s Reunion 2015 events, David Goodman and Steve Schwerner will also tell “The Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner Story” on Saturday, June 20 at 4:00 p.m. in the College’s Foundry Theater. The event will be moderated by Mila Cooper, Director of the Coretta Scott King Center. All events are free and open to the public.
About Danny Lyon:
Photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon captured some of the civil rights movement’s most compelling moments, from the March on Washington, from the March on Washington, to the aftermath of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. A self-taught photographer and graduate of the University of Chicago, Lyon began his photographic career in the early 1960s as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a national group of college students who joined together after the first sit-in by four African American college students at a North Carolina lunch counter.
Said Lyon of his work, “I wanted to change history and preserve humanity, but in the process I changed myself and preserved my own.”
Lyon became a leader of post-War documentary photography and film and helped create a mode of photojournalism in which the picture-maker is deeply and personally embedded in his subject matter. From 1962-1964, Lyon traveled the South and Mid-Atlantic regions documenting the Civil Rights Movement. His photographs were published in The Movement, a documentary book about the Southern Civil Rights Movement, and later in Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement, Lyon’s own memoir of his years working for the SNCC.
Lyon has won two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and ten National Endowment for the Arts awards. He is affiliated with Magnum Photos, and his work has appeared at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Center for Creative Photography. Two of his photos are attached at the end of this release.
Herndon Gallery Information:
Herndon Gallery hours are Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m. The gallery is closed June 30 through July 6 during the Antioch College quarter break. For more information, contact Jennifer Wenker, creative director of the Herndon Gallery at [email protected] or 937-319-0114. Additional information may be found at www.antiochcollege.org/campus-life/herdon-gallery
