Collective Perspectives 2010
The Progressive City: Birmingham in the 1930s
Thursdays in February from 5:30 - 7 p.m.
$10 for individual program; $30 for entire series
Includes program, culture-inspired refreshments, and admission to Vulcan Center Museum and Observation Balcony. Cash Bar.
In honor of Black History Month, Vulcan Park and Museum is proud to present Collective Perspectives 2010 – a series of non-traditional programs designed to educate, entertain, and enlighten participants on the cultural impact of progressive programs and politics on Birmingham's culture. Through performances by acclaimed musicians and actors, short documentaries by emerging student filmmakers, and visual art by an important member of FDR's Federal Arts Program, Vulcan Park and Museum invites you to explore this pivota period in Birmingham's rich history.
Event Details
5:00 p.m. Cash bar opens
5:30 - 6:30 p.m. Program
6:30 - 7:00 p.m. Conversation and refreshments
Program Content Details
After the stock market crash of 1929, Birmingham became a hot bed of tension – between blacks and whites, labor and management, progressive politics and the status quo. The 1930s was also a time of great resourcefulness and creativity, when New Deal programs celebrated the city's workers and erected a permanent home for Vulcan, and when a spirit of cooperation offered future generations hope for unity. Collective Perspectives 2010 looks at this dynamic time in Birmingham – through the era's art and music, and in the words of progressive leaders and everyday people who helped rethink and rebuild the city hit hardest by the Great Depression.
2.4.10 Birmingham in Black and White: The Life and Art of Frank Hartley Anderson
Boston architect Frank Hartley Anderson came to Alabama in 1909, to help plan the town of Corey (now Fairfield). Anderson established himself as a successful residential architect. But when construction projects dried up in the 1930s, Anderson joined the Public Works of Art Program and went on to create countless images of local life as a printmaker. Anderson's prints show an economically diverse group of citizens – workers toiling over laundry and the city's elite corps of jazz musicians performing in fabled Tuxedo Junction.
This installment presents 1930s Birmingham through Anderson's eyes, in a mini installation of his works and gallery talk by Birmingham Museum of Art curator Graham Boettcher. After the evening's presentation at Vulcan, the original works by Anderson will be on display at the Birmingham Museum of Art from February 9 to May 9, 2010.
2.11.10 Symphonies and Spirituals: William Dawson and the Birmingham Civic Orchestra
African-American composer and Anniston native William Dawson is known for his stirring arrangements of spirituals and his work directing the Tuskegee Choir. In the 1920s, Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony placed him beside Duke Ellington and William Grant Still as a major musical figure of the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s, the newly-formed Birmingham Civic Orchestra, now the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, championed his symphonic music in a series of concerts throughout the state – an unheard of move by most any orchestra, especially one in the segregated South.
This installment features acclaimed pianist Anthony Pattin, members of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, and the G.W. Carver Honor Choir performing Dawson's classical works and spirituals in an engaging concert of rarely performed works researched by ASO Education Manager Meaghan Heinrich.
2.18.10 Crossing Lines: Birmingham and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare
It's 1938 and people around the country are coming to Birmingham for the inaugural meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. In Crossing Lines, Lee Shackleford's new play about the SCHW, we meet the fictional character Eunice, who has come to Birmingham to support the cause of opportunity for all Southerners, and get to know through her a host of real-life conference participants.
Last year, Vulcan Park and Museum looked at one of the conference's organizers in the one-woman show Too Many Questions: An Evening with Virginia Durr. This installment featuring Crossing Lines reminds us that the city known as the birthplace of civil rights was also the cradle of the progressive movement in the South, a place where socialism and Jim Crow, the Old South and the New Deal, lived side by side.
2.25.10 Your Tax Dollars at Work: Documenting Federal Programs in the Magic City
At the Depression's lowest point, only 8,000 of Birmingham's 108,000 iron industry workers had fulltime employment. When help came through FDR's New Deal, Birmingham enthusiastically embraced the opportunities the federal relief agencies presented. During the 1930s, these "alphabet agencies" erected Vulcan's pedestal and park, built schools, housing, and state parks, and fixed the city's crumbling infrastructure. Documenting the before and after of Birmingham's New Deal was a corps of writers and documentary photographers that included Walker Evans.
Today, UAB's Ethnographic Film Program continues the tradition of documenting the impact of federal programs upon local communities. This program features short films by UAB students that explore the legacy of United States Housing Authority projects such as Elyton Village, Smithfield Court, and Cahaba Village, and the lasting effects of the New Deal art and building initiatives on traditionally African-American communities. Film project supported in part by a grant from the Ford Foundation.
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