Students Curate ALBA Exhibit on Washington Square
The Kimmel display windows featuring a previous exhibit.
This spring, NYU’s Kimmel Windows—a 13-window exhibition space spanning LaGuardia Place and West 3rd Street—will feature Fighting Fascism: Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) From New York University Special Collections, Tamiment-Wagner Collections, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.
The exhibition originated in a Fall 2019 undergraduate seminar, Art and Propaganda: The Case of the Spanish Civil War, taught by Miriam Basilio Gaztambide, Associate Professor of Art History and Museum Studies. Assistant University Archivist Danielle Nista’s teaching about the ALBA collection was an integral part of the research and curatorial process.
Miriam was inspired to teach the class drawing from her book Visual Propaganda, Exhibitions, and the Spanish Civil War, which analyzes the propaganda of the Republic’s Popular Front government, as well as developments in areas controlled by Franco, in the context of recent debates about the memorialization of the war. Miriam’s grandfather and other family members fought against Franco—a legacy that inspires her to draw attention to the dangers of fascism and dictatorships today.
The students in the class read Peter Carroll’s The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and the catalog of the exhibition Facing Fascism: New York and The Spanish Civil War. Danielle provided context on the history of the collection at NYU and instructed the students on archival research methods.
Syd Graham.
To prepare the exhibit, we selected themes for each window and proposed materials from the archive to be scanned that would showcase the many perspectives and stories of the war. In various ways, the students found relevant personal, historical, and contemporary points of reference as they studied posters, postcards, magazines, letters, photographs and more.
Among the show’s highlights are a set of drawings by New Jersey volunteer Syd Graham (killed in action at Brunete), which carefully render the propaganda posters in Spanish and Catalan that he saw along his way; letters written by veterans to protest their treatment by government agencies and the armed forces after the Civil War; and a photograph of volunteers, including NYU students, that put faces to names the students learned about in class.
The students in the class thoughtfully engaged with the material and brought these archival materials to life by putting them into historical context and drawing connections to recent events. They learned how to carefully work with archives, make curatorial decisions, and write concise text to educate viewers. The result is an exhibit that is both a look back at a particular time and place in history and a lens through which to view our current moment.
Fighting Fascism: Visual Culture of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) From New York University Special Collections, Tamiment-Wagner Collections, Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives is on view from March 3rd through mid-September 2023. For additional information about programming, Google “Kimmel Windows Gallery.”
