PHOTOGRAPHS; PRINTS
Warhol, Andy
U.S. (1928 - 1987)
Birmingham Race Riots
1964
Screen print on wove paper
20 x 24 in. (50.8 x 61 cm) sheet size; 27 3/4 x 31 x 1 1/2 in. (70.5 x 78.7 x 3.8 cm) frame size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.287

It is often suggested that the Pop art of Andy Warhol was essentially cool and distant or, conversely, nasty and mocking. Perhaps the clearest example of Warhol’s attention to more profound aspects of the human condition is this photographic silkscreen, created from a newspaper photograph of police in Birmingham, Alabama, who used violence to disperse nonviolent civil rights protestors. Before enlarging and printing the picture, Warhol cropped the original photograph to concentrate attention on the policemen, their attack dog and billy clubs, deliberately erasing the face of the particular protestor they have set upon. In doing so, he has created a more universal icon of oppressive authority as a memorial to the African American struggle for racial equality. -- Label copy for The Photographic Impulse: Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, July 12 to November 10, 2002.



This silkscreen followed several paintings that Pop art icon Andy Warhol made from images by the documentary photographer Charles Moore that ran in Life magazine as part of a photo essay covering the civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama during the spring of 1963. The title of this essay, “They Fight a Fire That Won’t Go Out,” refers to the fire hoses used against the protesters and also the indomitable fight for racial justice in the United States that the Civil Rights Movement unleashed. Moore’s photographs captured the drama of the scene and produced iconic images of race and power that continue to hold currency in the narrative of black bodies and white violence in the US.

Moore’s images were widely circulated; Life magazine reached more than half of the adult population in the United States at the time. Warhol’s work appropriates the image Moore captured, but rather than vacating this mass-circulated image of its meaning, as was often the result of Warhol’s production strategies, the image holds its gravity as a historical document and an image of race in America with perpetrators, victim, and witnesses present as actors in this national drama.

Label copy for The Time. The Place. Contemporary Art from the Collection, November 4, 2017 to April 22, 2018.