“They Called Us Colored” explores the everyday lives of Black Oklahomans in and around the farming community of Seward, located south of Guthrie in Logan County. The second exhibit, “Black Art-Ancestral Legacy,” brings to viewers a new understanding of African art and culture in relation to the art and culture of African-Americans.
The exhibits will be on display during the month of February during regular library hours. For more information about the exhibits contact the library at 477-2890.
“They Called Us Colored” is a featured exhibit in the TRACKS Traveling Exhibits program, a cooperative of the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the Oklahoma Museum of History, with support from Omniplex. Funding for TRACKS is provided by Sonic, America’s Drive-In and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
African-American photographers Opal Childs-Glover and Fred Younger created the exhibit photographs between the years 1914 and 1936. Exhibit curator Tonnia Anderson notes that the images in the exhibit capture moments in history - moments such as a 1920s baptism in Cottonwood Creek or the image of Annis D. Younger smartly dressed in her Sunday clothes. These photographic moments help to document how African- Americans lived and worked in this small, almost forgotten, rural community. Collected from family photo albums, shoeboxes, plastic bags and the walls of people who still remember the stories behind the images, the photographs are an invaluable record in the history of black Oklahomans.
The second exhibit, “Black Art-Ancestral Legacy” is based on a major exhibition of art and artifacts organized for national touring by the Dallas Museum of Art, also with the support from Philip Morris Companies Inc. The exhibit at the library was developed by the Texas Humanities Resource Center of Austin Texas , also with the help of Philip Morris Companies Inc.
"What is Africa to me?" When African American poet Countee Cullen asked this question in 1926, he challenged succeeding generations of writers, artists, performers and thinkers whose ancestors originated in Africa to answer it also. The photo-panel exhibit brings viewers a new understanding of African art and culture in relation to the art and culture of African-Americans.
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