The Thrill of the Vote: Episodes in Democracy Exhibition
The exhibition includes rare books, newspaper illustrations and other pieces that portray the history of voting rights.
ֱ presents the exhibition “The Thrill of the Vote: Episodes in Democracy” from Tuesday, Sept. 20 through Wednesday, Nov. 30 in the Theatre Lab Gallery in Parliament Hall, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton campus. The gallery is open from Tuesday through Friday from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. and one hour prior to Theatre Lab productions. An opening reception and lecture, “Debate Tailgate,” will take place on Monday, Sept. 26 at 5:30 p.m. The opening and exhibition are free and open to the public.
An election year offers the chance to plumb the depths of ֱLibraries’ collections to tell the unlikely story of participatory democracy in the United States. Hardly a natural state of affairs, the peaceful transition of power at the local, state and federal level is a rich topic for visual analysis. This exhibition will introduce a student-centered research project about how to tell the complex story of voting rights in the United States through works of art and popular culture.
The exhibition includes rare books and documents, newspaper illustrations and cartoons, posters, broadsides, pamphlets and other ephemera. Art history students also will showcase thematic suites of images and texts related to amending the Constitution, campaigning, women’s suffrage, voting rights, and contested elections. Related programing will include film screenings, readings, dramatizations, lectures and roundtables, all to charge the air with the importance of civic participation in the experiment of shared governance.
The exhibition was organized by Karen Leader, associate professor in the Department of Visual Arts and Art History, along with art history students and Victoria Thur of the ֱUniversity Libraries Special Collections. The exhibition was designed by Patricia ‘Z’ Koppisch, MFA candidate and senior designer of the University Libraries.
Leader also will present the lecture, “Visualizing Democracy: Selections from the Special Collections of FAU” on Wednesday, Nov. 2 at 4 p.m. in the Performing Arts Building, room 101 on FAU’s Boca Raton campus. Tickets and more information on this lecture can be found at or by calling 561-297-6124.
For more information on any of these events, email kleader@fau.edu. For directions to Parliament Hall, visit the ֱTheatre Lab website at www.fau.edu/theatrelab.
-FAU-
Tags: community | arts and letters