Art Exhibit on Brown vs. Board of Education :: Art Race Segregation

Recreating the Elements Surrounding Brown vs. Board of Education Usually when I imagine an art exhibit I think of giant portraits of historic figures or arrangements of simple geometric shapes, and I am unable to comprehend how their worth exceeds the value of the materials put into them. These exhibits are usually organized to give an impression of the appropriate artist or time period, but the exhibit commemorating the Brown vs. Board of Education decision creates a model of the concepts and ideas surrounding its issues. The very first thing I noticed when visiting this exhibit was the wallpaper surrounding the entryway. This wallpaper consists of black and white portraits of people’s faces surrounded by and overlapped with bright neon stripes. These stripes are illuminated by black lights aimed from the ceilings and make it difficult to tell the race of the people featured. Although it accomplishes this goal quite well, at first glance I really only noticed how it detracts from the exhibit’s overall appearance. The exhibit and the area outside of it have a somewhat calm modern appearance with track lighting and wood floors so the neon wallpaper does not go well with its surroundings whatsoever which is something definitely not expected in an art museum. The main goal of the exhibit is to make race seem irrelevant and indistinguishable. The first example of this I noticed is obviously the wallpaper outside, which seems quite random and bizarre until the rest o f the exhibit is seen. Once inside the exhibit, I immediately figured out the wallpaper’s purpose as dealing with race issues just like the majority of the works in the exhibit. In the middle of the room, there is a large couch aimed towards a projection screen which shows two sets of home movies side by side of a white and black family. These movies feature scenarios such as birthdays, Christmas, and vacations and other scenarios that I could relate to, which are almost identical in each version. By showing the similarities in the private lives of white and black families, this part of the exhibit demonstrates that racial differences do not make people unlike one another.