ALONG COMES MARY

On my ride back home from my trip up north, I decided to take a break & miss some traffic by hanging on State Street in Santa Barbara. One thing I always check out while there is the beautiful Museum of Art & their stunning gift shop. It turned out to be my lucky day as it was a free evening inside the museum. While I spent a good hour (or 2??) looking over each work of art, I was most taken with their temporary exhibit, This World Is Not My Home: Photography by Danny Lyon.

Lyon was a powerful force in the 1960s capturing political pieces especially of the segregation we dealt with as a society. Looking to not be part of the mold, he took stunning, sometimes harrowing photos that showed the sad truth going on in our country, as well as poignant moments, like children’s priceless faces or the gorgeous country side.

Heres what the museum’s web-site has to say about this exhibit:

This exhibition of more than 50 photographs and photographic montages, drawn from the artist’s studio and the Menil collection and spanning the period 1962 to the present, traces the fascinating and wide-ranging evolution of the career of New York and New Mexico-based Danny Lyon. A leading and explosively creative figure in the American street photography movement of the 1960s, Lyon distinguished himself from peers like Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander through his direct engagement with his subjects and his concern for those on the margins of society. His goal at the outset of his career, he says, was “to destroy Life magazine” by presenting powerful, real alternatives to the hollow pictures and stories permeating American mass media in that era of conformity. In the process he created thousands of images of striking psychological, political, and aesthetic power.

I have been thinking a lot about these photographs the past week with DOMA & gay rights at the forefront. While we certainly have come a long way since the discrimination of the era that spoke to Danny Lyon, I do feel that, sadly, there still is a long way to go. Segregation was still going on as my parents grew up, & here I am, a grown woman, finally hoping that once & for all my LGBT friends have the same rights as I do. I am sure African-Americans still have their times they feel like a minority, too.

What are your thoughts?

While This World Is Not My Home has closed in Santa Barbara, there’s still plenty of wonderful exhibits to see & many up-coming that I hope to see! xo