All but one of the quotations painted on the walls at the Museum at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts for an exhibition of photographs of human rights activists are from Robert F. Kennedy.
But
Kerry Kennedy, a daughter of Senator Kennedy, had turned her attention
elsewhere as she led a recent tour of the show for 25 visitors.
She
was focused on the 50 black-and-white photos that had been hung at eye
level, and her memories of the people who told her their stories before
posing for them.
“If
you listen to the tapes of the interviews, I’m laughing my head off in
almost every single one,” Ms. Kennedy, 55, said. “Having a sense of
humor is a part of being courageous. It’s a source of strength.”
“Speak Truth to Power: Human Rights Defenders Who Are Changing Our World” is on loan from the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights in Washington, of which Ms. Kennedy is president. The exhibition is derived from Ms. Kennedy’s 2000 book of the same title, a collaboration with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Eddie Adams, who died in 2004.
The
show describes the achievements of an international cast of human
rights defenders and the often grim situations that propelled them.
Subjects
include Juliana Dogbadzi, a former sex slave from Ghana who escaped
imprisonment and went on to denounce a cultural and religious practice
in which young girls are sent into a life of servitude, and Bruce
Harris, Central America’s foremost advocate for so-called street kids,
who risked his life to expose a baby-trafficking ring in which women
were tricked into giving up their newborns for adoption. (Mr. Harris
died in 2010.)
Also
included are better-known figures like Bishop Desmond Tutu of South
Africa, the Dalai Lama, and Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former
president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, sentenced to four
and a half years of hard labor as a result of his efforts to hobble
communism in his country. (Mr. Havel died in 2011.)
The
show gathers the portraits by Mr. Adams and the text from Ms. Kennedy’s
interviews and transforms them into an arresting gallery of images. The
Cambodian children’s rights activist Kek Galabru, for example, is shown
surrounded by skulls in Mr. Adams’s portrait. And a Sudanese human
rights figure called simply Anonymous is depicted in a long black robe
and a face-concealing hood.
“Aren’t
they rich, and just incredibly beautiful?” Ms. Kennedy said earlier,
during a private tour with this reporter. “It’s a challenge to take so
many portraits and have each of them be interesting, to keep the
viewer’s attention with something fresh. But he did a magnificent job.”
“These
people are the Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings of our time,” she added.
“To be able to share their stories in this format is really
meaningful.”
Ms.
Kennedy met Mr. Adams in the early 1980s, just after she graduated from
college. “I was working as an editor at a news photography agency in
New York,” she recalled. “They gave me a loupe and mounds of his photos.
They were always affecting. He doesn’t have any bad pictures.”
Mr.
Adams was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, for his photograph of a
police chief executing a Vietcong prisoner on a Saigon street. He
covered 13 wars as a photojournalist and was also acclaimed for his
celebrity portraits. The Bethel Woods museum discovered his work four
years ago, when his widow, Alyssa Adkins Adams, of Jeffersonville, N.Y.,
helped organize an exhibition of his Vietnam War photographs.
The
current show, which opened on Aug. 28 and will close on Dec. 31, was
timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Civil
Rights Act. “It also just happens to align very closely with our
mission, which is all about the ideals of the ’60s,” the museum’s
director, Wade Lawrence said.
Ms.
Kennedy, who lives in Westchester, has seen the exhibition dozens of
times, most recently at the Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall
International Airport and, before that, in Italy. Since its opening in
Washington in 2000, it has traveled to 25 American cities and four
continents. “Speak Truth to Power” is a continuing project, with new
individuals occasionally added. Some museums and exhibition spaces
modify the content.
The
Bethel show stays true to the book’s original subjects, but Mr.
Lawrence and his staff have added an “interactive lounge,” where
visitors are invited to join a “conversation wall” by filling out a card
expressing their thoughts on human rights. Dozens of cards, with
messages like “common decency: be an advocate,” have been clothespinned
to a series of wires since the opening. Also in the interactive lounge
is a video screen with “Speak Truth to Power: Voices From Beyond the
Dark,” a 2000 play by Ariel Dorfman, on loop. Its stars, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus and John Malkovich, adopt the voices of the activists.
Ms.
Kennedy said that both the conversation wall and another element of the
interactive lounge, a screen displaying a Twitter feed about “Speak
Truth to Power,” were new to her.
“It’s
always fun to see what different venues do,” she said, adding that the
Bethel location was an especially compelling one for her.
“Having
it here is special,” Ms. Kennedy said, “because it’s close to my home
and it’s also right next to Jeffersonville, where Eddie had his famous
yearly photo workshop, which I went to for many years. We’ve also done a
lot of work with farm workers in Liberty, which is right down the
street.”
During
the tour with the museum visitors, Mr. Lawrence said, he felt as though
Ms. Kennedy had been channeling her father, speaking with the same sort
of measured cadence that he had used. “Her mannerisms are so much like
his,” he said.
One
of her father’s quotations on the wall at the Bethel exhibition reads:
“Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has
its enemies.”
Pausing
in front of the portrait of Elie Wiesel, the author and concentration
camp survivor, Ms. Kennedy offered an observation of her own.
“In a sense, all of us have the capacity to be courageous,” she said. “I think the quest here is to remind people of that.”
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