A special exhibition of creative material produced by the volunteers who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War features published and unpublished poems, drawings, short stories, paintings, memoirs, and radio and film scripts culled, for the most part, from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive, now housed in NYU’s Tamiment Library.
A special exhibition of creative material produced by the volunteers who served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War is on display at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South, through December 16. Entitled “The Cultural Legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” the exhibition features published and unpublished poems, drawings, short stories, paintings, memoirs, and radio and film scripts culled, for the most part, from the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive, now housed in NYU’s Tamiment Library.
The exhibition is free and open to the public; gallery hours are weekdays, 9 a.m. through 5 p.m.. For further information call 212.998.3650 or log on to www.nyu.edu/kjc.
The artists and writers whose works are displayed in this exhibition were all volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of almost 3000 American men and women who chose to go to Spain to fight fascism (1936-39). The exhibition illustrates the cultural work and activism of these individuals during the years leading up to the Spanish Civil War, their forms and means of cultural expression during the war, and the creative production of the surviving volunteers upon their return home. A special section, “Profiles of Loss,” looks at the works and lives of a number of the many creative Americans who died in Spain.
A handful of Lincoln Brigade cultural figures have received considerable attention: the artist Ralph Fasanella whose work began to attract a mainstream audience in the early 1970s; the writer Edwin Rolfe (born Solomon Fishman), a poet and screenwriter who was blacklisted in 1947; and Conlon Nancarrow, winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award for his lifelong contributions to music. Many other artists and writers featured are “unknowns”; their works before and after the war highlight the intersection between ideological strife and cultural production.
A series of lectures and other events will take place at NYU in conjunction with the exhibition through December.