Event Details - The Crack in the Bell 1976: A Talk by Thomas Devaney

THE CRACK IN THE BELL 1976: A TALK BY THOMAS DEVANEY

Thursday, February 13

4:30–6:00 p.m.

VCAM Screening Room 001

Thomas Devaney is a poet, educator, and a 2014 Pew Fellow. During summer 2019, he collaborated with artists Greenhouse Media (Aaron Igler and Matthew Suib), Hilary Brashear, and Bi-College students Julia Coletti ’21, Jixin Jia ’21, Edward Ogborn ’19, Cole Sansom ’19, and Grace Sue ’20 to create Bicentennial City, an experimental film and exhibition exploring the complicated history of the 1976 celebration in Philadelphia, now on view at Haverford's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. 

In 1976, America was having its 200th birthday and Philadelphia was chosen to host the party. For over a decade prior, the July 4th weekend stood as a site of possibility. The celebration drew an estimated two million visitors, and in some ways the city was able to catch its breath. Yet things did not go as planned. With a racist mayor, post-Vietnam malaise, and the galvanized resistance of marginalized groups, the Bicentennial in Philadelphia laid bare some of the most pressing questions of America’s national identity. As we revisit this fraught history, Philadelphia’s famous Liberty Bell transcends its index of freedom-ringing and comes to embody the deepest fissures in American life: there’s a crack in the bell.

Organized by the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery as part of the exhibition Bicentennial City with support from the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities and VCAM’s Summer DocuLab Program. 

exhibits.haverford.edu/bicentennialcity