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WAM Nights: Stephen Towns in Conversation with Lu Vickers on "Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury"Friday, January 16, 2026
6-6:30 PM Cash bar
6:30 - 7:30 PM Program
Free and open to the public
To celebrate the captivating exhibition "Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury", WAM invites you to hear from Stephen Towns, the artist, and Lu Vickers, historian and co-author of Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation at Silver Springs.
WAM is excited to welcome the works of artist Stephen Towns to Wichita for a remarkable new exhibition, "Safer Waters: Picturing Black Recreation at Midcentury". Towns’ paintings and handcrafted quilts—seven of which were newly created for this exhibition—will transport viewers to sunny Paradise Park, a central Florida lake resort for Black people that flourished at midcentury.
◆ About the exhibition: https://wam.org/whats-on/exhibitions/safer-waters-black-recreation-at-midcentury/
◆ About Stephen Towns
Towns is a fiber artist and figurative painter whose work has been featured in several recent exhibitions and appears in the permanent collections of significant museums, including Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; Baltimore Museum of Art; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York, among many others.
◆ About Lu Vickers
Vickers lives in Tallahassee, Florida. She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for fiction as well as two Florida Book Awards and three Florida Individual Artist Fellowships. In addition to writing Remembering Paradise Park: Tourism and Segregation at Silver Springs with Cynthia Graham, she published Breathing Underwater, a novel, and three other Florida history books: Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids; Cypress Gardens, America’s Tropical Wonderland, and Weeki Wachee, Thirty Years of Underwater Photography.
◆ About WAM Nights
We’re open late on Fridays until 9 pm. Start your weekend with after-hours access to the galleries, shopping in the Museum Store, and a stop at EAT for bites and specialty drinks. WAM Nights feature programs with artists, musicians, and performers, offering a dynamic way to experience the museum. The building comes to life with local creatives during WAM Nights—an energizing, creative start to your weekend.
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