Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968

Steven Kasher Gallery is proud to announce a major exhibition, Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968. The exhibition features over 70 black and white vintage prints of photographs made by Jill Freedman in the protest camp built on the Washington Mall as the culmination of the Poor People’s Campaign. Freedman’s sustained pictorial effort is one of the lasting achievements of photography as social protest in America. This work was published in book form in 1971, but has never been exhibited previously. This exhibition coincides with the release of a new book, Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968, published by Damiani, and marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This is the artist’s second solo show in the gallery.

In the spring of 1968, Freedman felt a call to action and joined the Poor People’s Campaign, organized by Dr. King and led by Ralph Abernathy after Dr. King’s death. In the last months of his life Dr. King called publicly for a national demonstration by the poor that would “confront the power structure massively.” The Poor People’s Campaign and Resurrection City were the results of that call. The campaign brought over 3,000 people from nearly all 50 states to Resurrection City, an encampment of wooden shanties on the Washington D.C. Mall. It began with utopian do-it-yourself collectivism, was flooded by torrential rains, and ended in mass arrests. Freedman lived and photographed there for its six-week lifespan, portraying the daily struggle of an ad hoc society of different races, varying demands, and the common goal of calling attention to the injustice and inequality of America. After a sojourn of six weeks, Resurrection City’s Park Permit expired on June 23. The next day, police moved through the area, tearing down the buildings and arresting nearly 300 people. By June 24th, Resurrection City was gone.

Like its successor Occupy Wall Street, Resurrection City is sometimes remembered as a failure. Calvin Trillin captured it best when in June of 1968 he wrote in The New Yorker, “The poor in Resurrection City have come to Washington to show that the poor in America are sick, dirty, disorganized and powerless — and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized and powerless.” Freedman’s photographs present an alternative portrait, gritty but sympathetic, an insider’s view. Her images show life in the camp at its most humane and most mundane. Two men nap on cots in a tent, galoshes-wearing kids float a makeshift raft in the floodwaters, a young mothers seek treatment at a makeshift healthcare clinic, graffiti reads “Nothing but Soul,” and “Get Real World.” Freedman caught standoffs with baton-toting police, the