The College of New Jersey Art Gallery’s “Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement” provides a timely companion exhibition to the Princeton University Art Museum’s “The City Lost and Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960-1980.”
The TCNJ exhibition includes 50 photographs by photographer and filmmaker Lyon, whose 1960s photographs of the civil rights movement are considered to be some of the defining images of the era. The exhibition is part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.
The exhibition was developed by art2art, a nonprofit traveling exhibition organization, and is presented courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York.
Lyon, a self-taught photographer born in Brooklyn in 1942, helped create a mode of photojournalism in which the picture-maker is deeply and personally embedded in the subject matter.
The subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Menil Collection in Houston, Lyon began his career in the 1960s as the first staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group important to the creation of civil rights sit-ins, freedom rides, and the 1963 March on Washington.
“This young white New Yorker came south with a camera and a keen eye for history. And he used these simple, elegant gifts to capture the story of one of the most inspiring periods in America’s 20th century,” said congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis.
“Danny Lyon: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement” can be seen through Sunday, March 1, at the TCNJ Art Gallery, located in the Art and Interactive Multimedia Building (AIMM) on the campus at 2000 Pennington Road in Ewing. Gallery hours are Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays from noon to 7 p.m., and Sundays from 1 to 3 p.m. Free. For more information, visit tcnj.edu/artgallery or call 609-771-2633.
