Airport Hosts Doris Derby’s Photos Of Women In Civil Rights

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February 7th, 2017

Jennifer Williams/Doris Derby

 

Dashboard is an arts agency dedicated to challenging artists to create work in unfamiliar, unused and untraditional spaces. The organization is based here in Atlanta, and since it was founded in 2010, Dashboard has put on 42 exhibits in 7 US cities.

Their latest exhibition is in a venue that has seen artwork before. “Women Change Agents: The Photographs of Dr. Doris Derby” is now on view through April 5 in the Atrium Gallery at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

The exhibit features Derby’s photographs of female civil rights leaders taken from 1963-1972. Derby is a prolific artist, activist and educator who worked in the South alongside people like Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis and Martin Luther King, Jr. during the civil rights movement.

“We tend to think that leadership is just those that we know, and those same people are always represented,” she said. “And I wanted to show that leadership came in many different ages and different backgrounds.”

While the exhibit is at the airport, Dashboard Co-Founder and Executive Director Beth Malone promises their experimental mission will still apply.

“It’s always exciting for people to engage with work in a place that they don’t expect it to be,” Malone said. “In the airport, people are traveling, but they will also be engaged with these large-scale black-and-white photographs depicting women who were leading and supporting the civil rights movements in such a big way.”

Derby’s work will also be featured in a mural as part of the new Freedom Park Pathway Public Art Project at the Atlanta BeltLine. That dedication ceremony is on Feb. 25 at 2 p.m.

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