Museum featuring folk art as part of year-long celebration
After kicking off a yearlong celebration of diversity with its commemoration of the 50th anniversary of desegregation, USC, along with the McKissick Museum, has expanded on that memory.
Providing students, faculty and the community with visual tales of human rights, the museum has opened two exhibits celebrating diversity and civil rights: “If You Miss Me at The Back of The Bus,” and “Diverse Voices.”
“‘If You Miss Me at The Back of the Bus’ was our way of involving the 50th anniversary of desegregation for the university and the city,” said Janae Epps, an event coordinator at the museum. “‘Diverse Voices’ is about the ways that people build their communities and about how people identify themselves as a part of a community through their art forms.”
Though one exhibit mainly covers the stories of human rights, and the other of folk life, the exhibits go hand in hand. One of the main goals of both exhibits was to enhance students’ thinking about what art is and the meaning it holds in each student’s life.
“We try to place these objects in some sort of context that makes them fully relatable to people,” said Saddler Taylor, curator for the “Diverse Voices” exhibit.
Taylor also stressed the importance of art’s relationship with the human mind. She said she hopes visitors to the exhibits ask questions like, “What does that mean?” “Who made it?” “Why did they make it?” and “What was it used for?”
The museum is also holding a gala event entitled “Come Together,” a 2013 art exhibition and sale of artists’ work, Epps said the gala is a place where people not only get a chance to meet the artists behind the work presented in “Back of The Bus,” but also a chance to have a little bit of “whimsy” with what can often be a very dark part of American history.
“There will be a place where you can ‘become a freedom rider’ and have your picture taken on a bus with the freedom riders. There’s music, there’s food, there’s entertainment. It’s a party; it’s still a party,” Epps said.
Each artist that contributed to the exhibit was given information about the demographics of both the university and the region and were asked to use that information to create their own unique form of art.
The exhibit ended Friday, but if students are interested in viewing another unique part of their history, “Diverse Voices” continues to tell the story that “Back of the Bus” was a part of.
“The exhibition idea really started about six or seven years ago,” Taylor said. “It was sort of a group effort among myself, Lynn Robertson — the director at the time — and the late Jill Koverman.”
Taylor wanted a way to dedicate some of the gallery space in the museum to permanent folk life and traditional arts because it was a large part of the museum’s history and mission.
Taylor said that students could relate to the traditional culture that “Diverse Voices” tells through visuals, audio and an art form.
“USC students are one community within a large community that we are trying to reach out and present this material to,” Taylor said. “I think one thing that’s nice for students to see is that … some of the artists featured in the exhibition are not seniors — there are young folks that are doing this stuff, that are participating in traditional culture.”
McKissick’s next exhibit, “Defying The Quiet” — a Civil Rights Photography exhibition, will open Oct. 4.