October Issue 2000
Trying Not To Forget: Portraits from the Behind the Veil Collection in the Porch Gallery at the Center for Documentary Studies
Trying Not To Forget is an exhibition of photographs from Behind the Veil, a Durham, NC's Center for Documentary Studies project documenting African American life in the Jim Crow South on view through Dec. 3. The selection of photographs in this exhibit focuses on individual and family portraits drawn from the collection of nearly 5,000 images. Curators Susan Page, CDS exhibits coordinator, and Keisha Roberts, staff member of Behind the Veil, juxtaposed professional portraits with informal snapshots, exploring distinctions between public and private representations of the self. The exhibit encourages the viewer to consider how images mark landmarks and events within the family and the larger community, and the ways that such images are influenced by cultural and community expectations.
Launched in 1990, the Behind the Veil project seeks to correct historical misrepresentations of African American experiences during the period of legal segregation in the United States. This documentary record reflects not only the terror, hardship, and frustration of that time, but also the individual and collective struggles of African American Southerners to survive and prosper in spite of the policies of white supremacy.
Behind the Veil researchers collected more than 1,200 oral history interviews and copied nearly 5,000 family photographs and documents in their travels across the South. Through its narratives that recount the everyday experiences of African Americans from various locations and backgrounds, the collection provides rich documentary evidence of the diversity of African American life during the Jim Crow era. Behind the Veil also reflects the importance that institutions such as churches, fraternal societies, women's clubs, and political organizations played in African American community life.
Funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation, Behind the Veil is co-directed by Duke University historians William Chafe, Raymond Gavins, and Robert Korstad.
For further information check our NC Institutional
Gallery listings or call 919/660-3663 or visit the Center's Web
site at (http://cds.aas.duke.edu).
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