Bethany Collins
American, born 1984
The Birmingham News, 1963
INV-2432
Bethany Collins
American, born 19842017
The Birmingham News, 1963
Bethany Collins American, born 1984 →21st Centurynewsprintinstallation
Date
2017
Medium
Twice-embossed archival newsprint
Dimensions
18 prints, each: 63.5 × 48.3 cm (25 × 19 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Gift of Pamela J. Joyner and Alfred J. Giuffrida in honor of Gary and Denise Gardner
The Birmingham News, 1963 refers to a seismic year in the civil rights movement. Countless instances of police brutality and arrests of black civil rights participants culminated in President John F. Kennedy’s deployment of federal troops to Birmingham, Alabama. The tense standoff made daily headlines nationwide, but, as the selected covers from April 3 to May 13 testify, the Birmingham News purposefully downplayed the violence against African Americans. Critically interrogating the deep-rooted interrelations between race and language, Bethany Collins transforms these covers into a site of intervention that memorializes events ignored by the Birmingham press. Collins embossed, darkened, and distressed the front pages, reviving the very histories they ignored through this process of alteration and erasure. Emblematic of her conceptual and text-based practice, The Birmingham News, 1963 demonstrates how authored and institutional texts are always politicized, even when they take on the guise of objective reporting.
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