Extends the Message of the Thirteen/WNET Series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.
Traveling Exhibition Rising Above Jim Crow
Extends the Message of the Thirteen/WNET Series The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
A trove of paintings by a previously unheralded, self-taught artist from Spartanburg, South Carolina, provides the core material of a new traveling exhibition that offers a personal vision of the strength and creativity of African-American life during the final decades of segregation. Titled "Rising Above Jim Crow: The Paintings of Johnnie Lee Gray," the exhibition will open in New York City on November 20, 2002, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The exhibition encompasses some 35 paintings by Gray (1941—2000), as well as a selection of archival photographs and videotaped interviews that put the artwork into historical and social context. After the exhibition closes at the Schomburg Center on January 3, 2003, Rising Above Jim Crow will travel to venues in Chicago (January — April 2003), Atlanta (May — August 2003), and Los Angeles (September — December 2003).
Rising Above Jim Crow is sponsored by New York Life Insurance Company, which is also the sole corporate underwriter of the four-part Thirteen/WNET New York series "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow," to be broadcast in October on PBS. An advance presentation of the exhibition, timed to coincide with the broadcast of the television series, will be co-presented by the Schomburg Center and American Legacy magazine, and held at the Forbes Galleries, October 5—19, 2002.
