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Two Antilynching Art Exhibitions: Politicized Viewpoints, Racial Perspectives, Gendered Constraints Helen Langa Two art exhibitions protesting lynch violence in the United States were held in New York City early in 1935, both seeking to draw public attention to the horrifying fact that lynching continued to be a serious problem in the fourth decade of the century. Although the number of lynchings had declined from over one hundred each year in the 1890s to ten in 1929, it had risen again to twenty-eight in 1933, and it was clear that lynch terrorism had not yet been eradicated. Lynchings were most common in the South, but they took place in all parts of the country during the interwar decades. While lynch mobs usually targeted African Americans, they also murdered Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, and Native Americans, and attacked women and children as well as men. The terrorizing threat of lynch murder was frequently intensified by the torture, dismemberment, and burning of victims . Through these virulent expressions of racial hatred, lynchers sought to assert the supremacy of white rule not only over their victims but also throughout their communities. Organizers of the two exhibitions hoped that visual art could play a significant role in opposing lynching by increasing public awareness of the problem, and by moving viewers from empathy to active support for proposed legislative remedies. The title of an introductory essay in one of the two exhibition catalogs even proclaimed "Pictures Can Fight!" 1 The first exhibition, titled An Art Commentary on Lynching, was organized for the NAACP by its director , Walter White. It opened on February 15 and ran through March 2, 1935, at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries uptown on 57th Street. White had recently revived the NAACP's legislative campaign against lynching, which had slowed earlier in the decade, and was seeking publicity and support for the Costigan-Wagner bill, new antilynching legislation introduced into Congress for the first time in 1934. He conceived the exhibition as a unique way to draw attention to this effort, which supporters hoped would have a better chance of success than earlier legislation because it refrained from holding individual participants responsible for mob violence while mandating prosecution of collaborating local offiJohn Steuart Curry The Fugitive, 1935. • Lithograph. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Adelyn D. Breeskin 9 6 - N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art Hyman Warsager, The Law Drawing reproduced in New Masses 10, no.Z (1934): 7, _ Journal of Contemporary African Art cials and fines for their communities. The second show, called Struggle for Negro Rights, was developed by leftist members of the Artists' Union and several Communist-affiliated organizations that included the John Reed Club, the International Labor Defense, and the Harlem-based Vanguard group. It was held at the ACA (American Contemporary Art) Gallery on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, opening on March 3 and closing on March 16, immediately following the NAACP show. The leftist sponsors of the Struggle for Negro Rights (hereafter indicated as Negro Rights) exhibition advocated support for a more radical form of antilynch legislation titled the Bill for Negro Rights and the Suppression of Lynching, which demanded the death penalty for lynchers and connected the abolition of lynching to broader efforts to expand African Americans' civil equality. Adherents recognized that this bill had no chance for success in Congress, but saw it as asserting a principled stand for justice by insisting that lynching be treated as murder.2 Thus, while the NAACP show was intended to use the high-cultural associations of art to draw attention to its legislative campaign, the Negro Rights exhibition proposed both an alternative political analysis and a critique of the NAACP for elitism and its failure to offer a radical vision. Artists who participated in the two exhibitions faced the daunting challenge of developing visual images that both portrayed and condemned lynching as racist violence. News reports, sociological analyses, and literary works most often depicted lynch murder as a violent social spectacle, a vicious attack fomented by white perpetrators and focused on a black victim. Many artists who opposed lynching drew on aspects of this scenario, but others sought alternative types of imagery that...

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