FITCHBURG — Fitchburg State University is kicking off the academic year with an art exhibition by Keith Morris Washington, a professor at the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. The exhibition will feature Washington’s large-scale landscape paintings of lynching sites throughout the United States.
Titled “Within Our Gates: Site and Memory in the American Landscape,” the exhibition opens with a reception and gallery talk by Washington at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 20, at the Hammond Hall Art Gallery, located at 160 Pearl Street. The exhibition will be on display until Friday, Oct. 11, and is free and open to the public.
Washington’s paintings draw inspiration from modern photorealism and 19th-century Impressionism, capturing the landscapes of historic lynching sites as they appear today rather than depicting the violent acts themselves.
Each piece is titled after the victim and location, paired with contemporary news accounts of the crimes, creating a poignant dialogue between past and present.
The upcoming exhibition will feature paintings of the site where Matthew Shepard was killed in Laramie, Wyoming, in October 1998, and the location of Cooksey Dallas’s lynching in Johnson City, Tennessee, in July 1920.
“His paintings are stunningly beautiful on their own, but once you add the dimension of the historical context, they become supercharged,” said Jeff Warmouth, chair of the Communications Media Department at Fitchburg State University, in a statement announcing the exhibition. “There’s so much going on, from the conceptual aspect of interpreting history, to the artistry and aesthetic choices…to the emotional resonance as we empathize with the people whose lives were violently ended.”
For more information on this and upcoming exhibitions, visit Fitchburg State’s website at fitchburgstate.edu/campus-life/arts-and-culture/art-galleries.
