Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

A small room is wallpapered with a culturally and historically iconic pattern designed to connect distinctly chosen photographs, drawn images, and reclaimed prints of people, landscapes, and rituals of the American South during the half century (1900-1950) that preceded the revolutionary Civil Rights era. The room serves as a vehicle for filmed twenty-minute, cross-cultural conversations between seated voyeurs/witnesses of the southern apartheid experience as recreated in the papered walls. The designed wall paper inset with historic photographs encouragse the discourse to move on from the historic era to contemporary questions of race, location, and ownership of the U.S. national mantra of equality and democracy. There will be three filmed conversations of groups of ten persons each. These three groups are multiracial, multi-gender, and represent diverse class affiliations, but are defined by generation. Group One will include persons within the sixty-five to seventy-five age group. Group Two includes people between ages forty-five and fifty-five. Group Three will include people between ages twenty-five and thirty-five. The exhibit in Granada will include film cuts from these conversations along with a hosted focused discussion of both the art piece (wall paper and images) and the conversations it inspired across the generations represented in these groups.