Art Talk
American & Russian museums explore painful national histories
Edward Goldman talks about the painful national histories explored by museums in Montgomery and Moscow.
By Edward Goldman • • 3m ListenLast week, I learned about two national museums – a world apart – that have the courage and conviction to deal with the most painful and shameful chapters of their nation’s history. One, in Montgomery, Alabama. Another, in Moscow, Russia.
Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama. The museum and the memorial deal with “the nation’s least recognized atrocities: the lynching of thousands of black people in a decades-long campaign of racist terror” (NY Times).
Ken Gonzales-Day, who showed powerful and heartbreaking photos at Luis de Jesus gallery in 2015, where he recreated scenes of the lynching of a Latino in California as part of his series, Erased Lynching. Gonzales-Day hopes this series will bring greater visibility to the presence of Latinos in the history of lynching in the US.
Gulag History State Museum in Moscow, which shares the stories of millions of prisoners and victims of Stalin’s forced labor camps.
Gulag History State Museum. Image courtesy Gulag History State Museum.
