Friday, January 24, 2020
4:30 PM - 7:30 PM (ET)
WCC WCC Cantor Fitzgerald Art Gallery Lounge
Event Type
Reception/Community Gathering
Contact
Callinan, Matthew S
Department
Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities
Link
https://ems-web.haverford.edu/MasterCalendar/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=76828
Opening Talk: 4:30pm
Reception: 5:30pm-7:30pm
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.
During summer 2019, five Haverford and Bryn Mawr College students
collaborated with poet Thomas Devaney and Greenhouse Media to explore
this surreal moment in Philadelphia and national history through an
experimental documentary film. The exhibition Bicentennial City
continues that project as an interactive installation with
multi-channel projections, sculptures, and Bicentennial ephemera,
seeking to explore the many roles myth and memory play in the psyche of a
city.
Bicentennial City builds on the Summer 2019 DocuLab project “The Bicentennial in Philadelphia,”
led by Thomas Devaney and Greenhouse Media (Aaron Igler and Matthew
Suib) with Hilary Brashear, Julia Coletti ’21, Jixin Jia ’21, Edward
Ogborn ’19, Cole Sansom ’19, and Grace Sue ’20.
Sponsored by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and VCAM.