|
|
|
Exhibition Review
"Seeking Justice: The Leo Frank Case Revisited." William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, Atlanta, Ga. http://www.thebreman.org/exhibitions/seeking_justice.htm.
Temporary exhibition, Feb. 17, 2008–March 22, 2009. 25,000 sq. ft. Jane Leavey and Sandra Berman, curators; Gary Super, designer.
|
| Making public history projects in Atlanta that deal with the events that culminated in the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of a pencil factory who was accused of murdering a thirteen-year-old female employee, is to wade into a minefield of contention about one of Georgia's most storied crimes. Almost a century later, Frank's murder still triggers intense local debate in which perceptions of crime and punishment intersect with anxieties about the legacy of southern vigilante violence. Simply put, this lynching is history that still lives, and for some local museums this has been reason enough to leave the story of Leo Frank alone. |
1
|
|
"Seeking Justice" was the William Breman Jewish Heritage and Holocaust Museum's effort to use exhibit practice to mediate local passions about the meaning of Leo Frank's life and death. The exhibition was long in the making: local museum professionals at the Atlanta History Center tried in the early 1990s to incorporate the Leo Frank story into an installation exploring the myths of the American South, but the Frank portion was shelved because several museum board members voiced concerns about potential controversy. (The project "Disputed Territories: Myth, Mystery, and Memory in Atlanta History" eventually emerged—sans the Frank installation—at the museum as a permanent exhibit on the myths of the South popularized by Gone with the Wind [book, 1936; film, 1939].) While the Frank story was already incorporated in the Breman's permanent installation on Jewish life in Atlanta, "Seeking Justice" finally gave this important story its own interpretive frame. |
2
|
|
Although history museum projects traditionally focused on politically neutral subjects, much has changed in Atlanta and in the nation as a whole over the last decade, making an exhibit on the negative dialectics of lynching history a viable public history project. "Seeking Justice" was one of many recent efforts to resurrect the suppressed history of America's lynching violence. Since 2000, Atlanta's image of itself as a city purged of its legacy of racial violence—"a city too busy to hate," as one influential mayor dubbed the city as early as 1955—has been considerably undone: That year brought two Leo Frank–themed stage productions to the city, one of which played in the conservative Marietta suburbs where Frank was lynched and where many descendants of the perpetrators still reside. In 2002, after a series of fits and starts, a local consortium hosted "Without Sanctuary," an exhibition of lynching postcards, at Atlanta's Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site. Four years later, a coalition of educators and community organizations staged a week-long centennial commemoration of the 1906 Atlanta race riot—the first commemoration of its kind anywhere in the state. Slowly, the city became accustomed to cultural events that did not sanitize its violent racial past, and museum professionals, heeding the enormous critical and popular successes of these ventures, began to realize that racial and controversial subjects can be used to an advantage in exhibition practice. |
. . . |
There are about 1876 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
