Today from our archives, we bring you Lia Wilson’s review of a recent exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Wilson explains the importance of this exhibition: “Witness does the essential and painful work of revealing how an inadequate visual cultural record can come to mirror inadequate social reform. There can be no greater demonstration of the need for a more diverse and inclusive art-historical canon and[…..]

As someone born two decades after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I received visual access to the civil-rights era predominantly through photographic documentation. Black-and-white photos in history books, documentary films, and microfilm of front-page newspaper stories shaped my understanding of the period, suggesting a more or less linear sequence of events. Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, now at the Brooklyn Museum,[…..]