For All The World To See

Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Closed November 26, 2011

This exhibition is organized by The Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County in partnership with the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

This is the first exhibition to explore the role played by visual images in shaping, influencing, and transforming the fight for civil rights in the United States. The struggle for racial justice in the United States was fought as assuredly on television, in movies, magazines, and newspapers, and through the artifacts and images of everyday life as it was on the streets of Montgomery, Little Rock or Watts. The movement produced myriad images in multiple formats and sensibilities and in various contexts, from the modest newsletters of local black churches to televised news reports on the state of American race relations.

The exhibition looks at images in a range of venues and forms, tracking the ways they represented race in order to perpetuate the status quo, stimulate dialogue, or change prevailing beliefs and attitudes.

Learn more about this exhibition.
Traveling exhibition
For All The World To See opens in June 2011 in NMAAHC's gallery at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Venues and dates for the exhibition are:

  • Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, Maryland (November 2012 to March 2013)
  • Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts (April 2013-August 2013)
  • Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, Nevada (Fall 2013).