Josephine Baker Exhibit Shines With Stardust

The History of Jazz Galleries at The Sheldon Art Galleries will be the setting for a major exhibition celebrating the life and career of Josephine Baker from April 28 to August 26, 2006. An opening reception free to the public will be held Friday, April 28 from 5 – 7 p.m.

Through vintage photographs, posters, drawings, prints, paintings and ephemera, the exhibition Josephine Baker: Image and Icon will trace the entertainer's important and innovative contributions to the Jazz Age. Mounted in the spring of 2006 in celebration of the 100th anniversary of Baker's birth, the exhibition will be drawn from a variety of important public and private collections including the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D. C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, the Davis Museum at Wellesley University and others. It will trace the development of her image, first as the exotic "other" in a Paris infatuated by all things African, then as glamorous cabaret star who sustained a long career well into her late 60s.

The exhibition will contain sections on Josephine Baker's early years with Sissle and Blake and other African-American productions, her years as a star in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, and her later participation in the French resistance during World War II and her important contributions to the civil rights movement in America. Listening and video stations will highlight her music, dance and film contributions. Tandem exhibitions of painting, sculpture, decorative arts, architecture and photography from the 1920s and 30s in the Bellwether Gallery, the Gallery of Photography and the Bernoudy Gallery of Architecture will provide a visual arts context that fueled the Jazz Age and the remarkable life and career of Josephine Baker. In conjunction with the exhibition, The Sheldon will present concerts of early jazz and French cabaret and theatrical productions about Josephine in the adjoining Sheldon Concert Hall.

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