We'd like to invite everyone to a Gallery Talk with Robert Houston to discuss his photographs of the Civil Rights Movement and his experiences photographing the 1968 Poor People's Campaign. Sixty of Houston's images are currently on display at the James E. Lewis Museum of Art at the Murphy Fine Arts Center at Morgan State. Following its viewing here at Morgan, a smaller exhibition of images will be on display at the Senate Building in Annapolis for a year, with subsequent viewings at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Frostburg, and Montgomery College.
 
In light of this year’s presidential election and the current discourse on healthcare, education, and what it means to be poor in America, the exhibit is timely, significant and socially relevant.  It is also important as a tool that creates discussion around a key but forgotten chapter in history.  Please join us and take advantage of the opportunity to speak with an historic figure about an historic event in civil and human rights.
 
Mentored by Gordon Parks, Robert Houston is compassionate in his insight and visual commentary.  Houston took the photographs for this exhibition while on assignment Life Magazine.  Each photo captures a sample of America’s poor living in tents made of plywood and tarp along the Nation’s Mall and portrays the vision of a people through the specificity of singular humanities.  Houston’s portraits differ from most images of protest and struggle, however.  He reveals the strength in quiet dignity and finds nobility in places where one might assume it cannot exist.  He sees a collective spirit in the hopes of individuals and captures hope in a single frame.  As Gordon Parks once wrote, Houston’s “camera is guided by his heart.”
  

MOST DARING DREAM:
Robert Houston Photography & the
1968 Poor People’s Campaign
October 23 – December 22, 2008

Gallery Talk
with Robert Houston
October 30, 2008
11 AM – 12 noon
 
James E. Lewis Museum of Art
Carl J. Murphy Fine Arts Center at
Morgan State University
2201 Argonne Drive
Baltimore, MD 21251
(443) 885-3030

This exhibition was made possible with funds from the Maryland Humanities Council’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Remembrance and Reconciliation, through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities