Marta Valier provides an update on the opening of our Do-It-Yourself exhibition Speranza e Dignità in Cerignola, Italy, where she participated as a speaker. Also, we invite you to come to the opening of our exhibition Hope and Dignity: The Farmworker Movement at the Museum of Social Justice in Los Angeles later this month. Last, our archivist/historian/photographer Keith Rice publishes the first of two entries of his summer adventure in the French Riviera, where he attended several international photo exhibitions, including one at the Mougins Center of Photography.
From Delano to Cerignola!
By Marta Valier
The DIY exhibition Speranza e Dignità (Hope and Dignity) opened last July 25 at Pietra di Scarto, a social cooperative in Cerignola a town in the province of Foggia in the south of Italy. Cerignola is the birthplace of Giuseppe di Vittorio, one of the most influential trade union leaders of the labor movement in Italy. The exhibition will travel to schools in September. It was a fun night! The other speaker was Antonella Morga, a representative from CGIL, the second largest trade union in Europe, who co-authored a report about the extreme right and the neofascist groups in Puglia, titled Essi Vivono, a title inspired by John Carpenter’s science fiction and horror movie They Live where the protagonist discovers that the ruling class are aliens hiding their true appearance. The moderator was Pietra de Scarto’s Alessandra Ricupero. Ricupero, who has previously worked for Libera, a network of associations, social cooperatives, movements, schools, and unions that stand against mafias, corruption, and crime, underlined the link between organized crime and workers’ rights, in Italy as well as around the world. The audience embraced the exhibition with photos by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns, and the hospitality of the Pietra di Scarto staff was exceptional. The panels were printed as banners to last longer outdoors and be reused after this exhibition ends.
“We are keeping this exhibition open the entire summer,” said the cooperative’s director, Pietro Fragasso. “We got a grant for a project, Per Motivi di Giustizia (For Reasons of Justice), aimed at engaging with students. We plan to bring these banners along when we visit the schools starting in September.” Paola Sgobbo, a middle school teacher from the nearby town of Troia present in the audience, asked if her school could be included. "I want my students to see this exhibition," she said. Serena Cazzollo from Associazione Casa Di Vittorio, praised the organization of the twelve banners with a mix of photos and text, each covering a different aspect of farmworkers' lives, such as housing and children in the fields. She noted that these banners well explained the reasons and methods behind the farmworkers' organizing, illustrated by other banners on the boycott, strikes, and the march to Sacramento. Talking with her, we decided that after bringing the Farmworker Movement to Cerignola, it would be fun to bring Di Vittorio’s story to Delano. Let’s see what we can do.
A special thanks goes to Pietra di Scarto’s staff: to Pietro Fragasso, Jolanda Merra, and their children, Viola and Samuele for their hospitality, to Francesco De Luca for printing the posters as banners, and to Giuseppe Mennuni, Michele Dazzeo e Nicola Direda for setting up the exhibition in less than three minutes.
Hope and Dignity opens this month in L.A.
The exhibition “Hope and Dignity: The Farmworker Movement” opens on Thursday, August 15, with an opening reception on Saturday, August 17, at the Museum of Social Justice in downtown Los Angeles. Dr. Kent Kirkton, Marta Valier, and Joseph Silva curated this exhibition. The 450+ photos feature the visual history of the early years of the farmworker movement as captured by photographers Emmon Clarke and John Kouns. The diversity, energy, and enthusiasm of organizers and supporters infused into the farmworkers’ union and La Causa (The Cause) is reflected in images of the marches, pickets, boycotts, elections, union meetings, and musical and theatrical performances. Other images reflect the dignity of the work—performed in many cases by entire families, including children—and the indignity of their labor conditions, housing, and the violence against them by strikebreakers and law enforcement. Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center digitized and made accessible thousands of photographs by Clarke and Kouns that form the Farmworker Movement Collection at the California State University Northridge Library’s digital collections. We also created an educational website and a Do-It-Yourself exhibition.
The exhibition also juxtaposes Andy Zermeño's drawings that inspired El Teatro Campesino’s characters with Clarke’s and Kouns’s photographs of El Teatro’s early actos, or skits. In collaboration with César Chávez, Zermeño created the cartoons of the farmworker Don Sotaco (Mr. Shorty) and of the forces oppressing him—the boss, the contractor, and the politicians—that graced the pages of El Malcriado. Playwright and actor Luis Valdez would then adapt these characters to the stage for El Teatro Campesino—whether on the picket line or a trailer’s platform. Watch a video here.
Photography in the French Riviera (Part 1)
By Keith Rice
On June 26, 2024, I arrived in France and spent the next two weeks practicing my newfound passion for taking photographs, landscapes in particular. This vacation was originally meant to be an exploration of the work of many photographers, all in the beautiful South of France. In these two entries, I will share some of my experiences
In July 2023, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and prospective Bradley Center donor, Marie Baronnet returned from the Arles Les Rencontres De La Photographie international photography festival in the South of France and suggested attending the festival the following year. As the historian and one of the archivists for the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center photographic collection, Marie thought it would be a good idea for me to experience the world of photography internationally.
In addition to the festival in Arles, Marie also suggested that I arrive in France a week earlier to attend the opening of the photographic exhibition Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, based on the Stephen Shames and Ericka Huggins book of the same name, at the Mougins Center of Photography (Centre de Photographie de Mougins) a fifteen-minute drive from Cannes. The year passed quickly and on June 25th, I found myself enroute to France. I had previously visited France on several occasions, either working as a sound engineer for former Earth Wind and Fire guitarist Al McKay or as a guide for friends or family, which left very little time for personal exploration.
The French Rivera, especially Cannes, is known for wealth and ostentatiousness. So, it may seem like an unlikely place for an exhibition featuring the contributions of mostly African American women in a revolutionary black organization during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Surprisingly, this was the second in a trilogy of exhibitions focusing on the African American experience. Credit for this exhibition must first be given to Ericka Huggins and the fearless young men and women like her who committed their lives to the struggle for all oppressed people during America’s turbulent 1960s.
Stephen Shames was a student at the University of Berkeley in California when, at age 20, met Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, during an anti-Vietnam War protest in San Francisco. Seale asked Shames to be the official photographer for the Black Panther Party. Shames accepted and between 1967 and 1973 he had unrestricted access. He not only documented and helped shape the Panthers’ public image by capturing life behind the scenes, including Party meetings and Bobby Seale at work on his Oakland mayoral campaign. Shames’ archive of Panther images is the largest in the world.
The Mougins Center of Photography’s (Centre de Photographie de Mougins) Artistic Director François Cheval and Director Yasmine Chemali continue the Center’s mission to choose programs guided solely by the principle of connection to reality through a selection of powerful and timely subjects, with respect for gender equality and proper recognition of women photographers, constantly alert and on the lookout for non-European expression.
The Mougins Center of Photography is beautifully located in the center of an old village, in a rehabilitated presbytery. The exhibition opened on July 27, 2024, to an enthusiastic crowd of local community members and attendees from as far away as Paris. Ericka and Stephen traveled from the United States to attend the opening and participate in a Q and A on Saturday, July 29, 2024.
I attended both events. I had previously met Ericka in 2020 at UCLA at an annual event to commemorate the killing of two members of the Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party, her husband John Huggins, and chapter founder Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter. Ericka was gracious enough to allow me to conduct a phone interview with her for my dissertation, “The Making of the Classic Period of the Long Black Power Movement in Los Angeles California” just as the pandemic was changing all our lives. I reintroduced myself to Ericka and thanked her again for the interview. I met Stephen for the first time and it was a pleasure to have several extended conversations with him over the next week in Mougins and Arles.
The Mougins Center of Photography is as beautiful inside and outside. Its white walls and black ceilings are simple, neat, and elegant in a “less is more” approach. The choice by curators François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali to mount Stephen’s black and white prints in white frames with white mats against white walls enhances the elegance of the space.
I hope this article inspires curators and museum directors in the United States to mount this homegrown exhibition taking place across the Atlantic Ocean. It is an exceptional example of the contributions of women, who are often overlooked in cultural, political, and social movements.
(Part 2 of Keith Rice’s journal on Marseille and Arles will be published in our next issue)