Home » Events » Faces of Resistance: Through the Lens of Ilka Hartmann

Faces of Resistance: Through the Lens of Ilka Hartmann

Loading Map....

Date/Time
Date(s) - 06/28/2017 - 07/15/2017
11:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Location
New Museum Los Gatos

Category(ies)

Add This Event to Your Calendar


Buy Tickets | FREE for NUMU members and visitors under 18 years of age

  • Museum Hours: Wednesday 1pm-5pm, Thursday 11am-8pm, Friday – Sunday 11am-5pm

While the San Francisco Haight-Ashbury neighborhood attracted thousands of young people searching for peace, love and community during the Summer of Love, other social justice movements were gaining traction in the wake of the turbulent Civil Rights and Free Speech movements of the early 1960s. Ilka Hartmann arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area from her native Germany in 1964. Initially a student of theology at UC Berkeley, she took a photography class that re-mapped her dedicated, life-long path as a photographer. In the 1960s Hartmann found herself at the epicenter of the Free Speech movement. From this juncture, she launched her 53-year career as a photographer and activist, chronicling major civil rights and social justice movements, events, and personalities.

Visitors to the exhibition will be invited to explore connections between movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s and social justice movements today. The exhibition features photographs and personal items from movement events and leaders as collected by Hartmann.

Notable personalities and events captured in photographs in the exhibition include: Huey Newton, the Black Panthers, Kathleen Cleaver, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Dennis Banks and the American Indian Movement, the Anti-war movement, San Francisco LGBT marches and parades in the early 1970s.

Ephemera also on view includes: protest flyers, original Black Panther newspapers and manuscripts, a beaded cross necklace worn by United Farm Worker marchers, and an original, handwritten speech written by Dennis Banks at a 1979 No Nukes Rally in San Luis Obispo, CA.

Ilka Hartmann’s work has been exhibited widely, including locally at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Oakland Museum of California, and in permanent Bay Area displays focused on important people and events. On Alcatraz Island her photographs are shown daily in a film about the Indian Occupation of the island. Her work is also exhibited internationally in Berlin and Hamburg, at URBIS in Lancaster (England), in China and Brazil.

Her images have been published in Der Spiegel, Encyclopedia Britannica, the Oxford Dictionary, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Smithsonian Handbook on the North American Indian series and other books, newspapers and magazines. Her photographs are included in films and television programs shown in the United States, Canada and Europe. Among her books are The Town that Fought to Save Itself (with Orville Schell,) a story of Bolinas in the 1970s; Pearson, A Harbor Seal Pup (with Susan Meyers;) and books on the Indian occupation of Alcatraz. Hartmann lives in a small community on the Northern California coast.

Faces of the Resistance: Through the Lens of Ilka Hartmann is generously supported by The Borgenicht Foundation. The main purpose of the Foundation is to promote the understanding of secularism as the way and hope for establishing peace in the world. In addition, the Foundation supports social justice, conservation and historic preservation, the arts, health, and education.

NUMU is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization tax ID 94-1619601

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.