Conflict & Creative Response: A Conversation on the Fight for Civil Rights

In this conversation presented by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, photographer Sheila Pree Bright, composer Hannibal Lokumbe, and visual artist Ron Bechet will explore how past and present civil rights struggles serve as an impetus for creative expression. The panel will consider the lasting influence of the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights Movement as well as artistic responses to more modern racial justice campaigns, such as the Black Lives Matter Movement. Following the lecture, the audience is invited to join panelists on a gallery tour of artist John T. Scott’s “I Remember Birmingham” series, a group of multimedia works created in response to the 1963 white supremacist bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The program will begin at 6 p.m. at The Helis Foundation John Scott Center. 

Ron Bechet is a visual artist with works exhibited nationally and internationally. He is the Victor H. Labat Professor of Art at Xavier University of Louisiana, where he has taught for over twenty years. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees at the Ogden Museum and has served on numerous boards and commissions, such as the Joan Mitchell Foundation and Imagining America’s National Advisory Board. He served as the first director of Xavier Art Department’s Community Arts Partnership Program. Bechet holds a BA in fine arts from the University of New Orleans, and an MFA from the Yale University School of Art.   

Sheila Pree Bright is a renowned international photographer and the mind behind the celebrated book #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests. Her series include Invisible Empire, #1960Now, Suburbia, Young Americans, Plastic Bodies, and an evocative portrayal of the ’90s Hip Hop scene. Her work is in the collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, High Museum of Art, and the Do Good Fund, among others. 

Hannibal Lokumbe is an American composer, poet, community activist, and jazz trumpeter whose career spans more than five decades. Originally from Texas, Lokumbe was for many years a mainstay of the New York jazz scene, where he performed with greats such as Gil Evans, Roy Haynes, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, and Elvin Jones. A Harlem Jazz Hall of Fame Lifetime Inductee, Lokumbe is also the recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts award, Detroit Symphony Orchestra Lifetime Achievement award, and United States Artist Award in Music. Lokumbe has written pieces for the orchestras of Philadelphia, St. Louis, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, Nashville, and Oklahoma, as well as the American Composers Orchestra and Carnegie Hall. He is the founder and director of the Music Liberation Orchestra, a program that teaches music, poetry, and genealogy to incarcerated men in Texas, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.   

This program is presented by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities as part of “Convulsions: Progress and Backlash in the Long Fight for Civil Rights," a project supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ United We Stand initiative. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. 

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Helis Foundation John Scott Center, 938 Lafayette Street, New Orleans, United States