The African-American fight for civil rights is one of the most profound, turbulent and tragic chapters of 20th-century American history. A new exhibit at the Skirball Cultural Center captures that epic struggle. ‘Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956’1968’ is a story told via nearly 170 large, crisp gelatin silver prints divided in chapters like a book, and its authors are some 35 photojournalists and movement members. They include Bob Adelman, Morton Broffman, Bruce Davidson, Bill Eppridge, Larry Fink, James Karales, Danny Lyon, Builder Levy and Steve Schapiro. While some images on display have been published in periodicals, others have never been publicly shown before, including an incredible sequence of photos (taken on Mother’s Day, 1961) depicting the firebombing of a Greyhound bus of Freedom Riders taken from an unusual perspective: a Klansman photographer. ‘There are extraordinary narratives that surround each of these individual images,’ said curator Julian Cox at the Skirball last week. Represented in ‘Road’ are such turning points in the civil rights movement as the Montgomery bus boycott, the March on Washington, and the Selma-to-Montgomery march, while the penultimate chapter brings the struggle home with images culled from parts of Los Angeles: Pasadena, Westwood, Valley College and downtown. The final wall conveys the 1968 assassination of the movement’s leader and its aftermath. One of the compelling images is Adelman’s ‘Dr. Martin Luther King, Lying in State, Atlanta, Georgia,’ an open-casket portrait of the slain Civil Rights leader. Among the reasons that a Jewish-American museum has for running this exhibit is the affinity Jews have always had with the African-American struggle; the common fight against discrimination and for social justice, and the fact that many participants in the movement were Jewish, from the photographers on display here, to young civil rights workers Michael Schwermer and Andrew Goodman, who were murdered with an African-American, James Chaney, in Mississippi, to Rabbi Abraham Herschel, who marched alongside Dr. King. One Jewish student, Lyon, shot photos that were turned into posters for his organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. One of the featured photographers, Dr. Doris Derby, 70, visited the Skirball last week. She was an African-American student at Hunter College in New York who had gone down to the South intending to stay for only a year to teach literacy. She wound up living in Mississippi for nine years, all the while snapping images for magazines and for brochures for various pro-rights grassroots organizations. Derby explained that Fannie Lou Hamer, the subject of a poignant portrait by Schapiro, became an activist who galvanized other African-Americans to vote after her daughter was refused medical attention at an all-white hospital and died while en route to a segregated one in Memphis. ‘We were veterans, too,’ Derby said, reflecting on a month during which our nation’s military is honored each year. ‘We saw our friends and many people we didn’t know get beat up, tortured and killed.’ ‘Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956’1968’ runs through March 7. The Skirball Cultural Center is located off the 405 freeway at 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd. Tickets: $10 general; $7 seniors and full-time students; $5 children 2 to 12. Free to all on Thursdays. For more information, visit www.Skirball.org or call 310-440-4500.

UCLA Organist Christoph Bull Unites with Action Painter Norton Wisdom for John Lennon Tribute

‘Get back to where you once belonged” go some lyrics from a Beatles song. Apply them to the Villa Aurora’s 1928 Artcraft theater organ, which is currently under restoration for its December 2010 return. UCLA organist Christoph Bull will perform at a Beatles-themed benefit concert at ‘John Lennon Tribute: A Happening,’ to take place on Tuesday, December 8 at the Villa on Paseo Miramar. Proceeds will go toward the organ’s restoration. Bull and artist Norton Wisdom, billed as an ‘action painter,’ will pay tribute to late musician Lennon, one of the Beatles and one of the most important songwriters of all time. Lennon was fatally shot 29 years before the date of the Villa’s event. Among the 29 selections from Lennon’s Beatles and solo songbooks are: ‘In My Life,’ ‘Norwegian Wood,’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Imagine.’ Bull, who hails from Manheim, Germany, has been the university organist and organ professor at UCLA since 2002. He is also the principal organist at First United Methodist Church in Santa Monica. He has performed at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Royce Hall, the Whisky a Go Go and the Viper Room. He has also opened in concert for pop singer Cindy Lauper, and has worked with funk legends George Clinton and Bootsy Collins of Parliament Funkadelic. Since 1979, the artist Wisdom has worked as a performance painter with musical ensembles, spontaneously painting images at the Monterey Jazz Fest 2005, the Winter Olympics 2002, the opening of the Bellagio Hotel Las Vegas, and with Cirque Du Soleil, Las Vegas. The Santa Barbara Art Museum, Laguna Art Museum, San Diego Museum, Skirball Cultural Center, and Orange County Museum of Art are among the California institutions, where he has contributed his art. Guests of honor at the benefit will include Mechthild Borries-Knopp, the Villa Aurora’s executive director, and the organ builders currently working to restore the Villa’s organ in time for its comeback concert: Ed Burnside, Ken Kukuk and Greg Rister (recently featured in the October 22 article ‘A New Life for Villa’s Organ,’ at the PalisadesPost.com archives). Attendance at the event is a tax-deductible contribution that will help Villa Aurora restore an instrument played by Hanns Eisler, Bruno Walter, and Ernst Toch and which accompanied films screened for Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger and their guests, among whom were Bertolt Brecht, Charlie Chaplin, and Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Contact: 310-454-4231 or e-mail infola@villa-aurora.org.

The Pacific Palisades Art Association (PPAA), which sponsors two juried shows a year, held a reception at the Palisades Branch Library on November 7 to announce the results of its November art competition. The award winners for drawing were Hannah Spitz, whose pieces took first and third place, and Linda Damon, who took second. In the mixed-media category, Esther Pearlman was first, Anne Schwartz, second, and Randy Koenig, third. Ruth Selwitz won in the print category. The photography winner was Carol Gee. Second place was Christopher Alexakis and third was Jessica Radermacher. Frank Damon took first and second in digital art photography, with Eliza Krause placing third.’ Multiple-award winner Spitz is PPAA’s youngest member. A 17-year-old senior at the Archer School, a student at Brentwood Art Center and a California Arts Scholar, Spitz also received awards in PPAA’s three previous juried shows.’ ‘In addition to Spitz, we also have the two Alexakis boys (Chris and James) who are now in college,’ said PPAA President Ellen Travis. ‘All are good artists,’ Show chairman Terri Bromberg, creator of the Palisades Clearwater Mural and an art teacher at Santa Monica College, noted that digital art photography is an exciting new competition category, which recognizes artwork in which the original digital image has been extensively manipulated with computer technology. Juror Ofunne Obiamiwe, an associate digital art professor at Santa Monica College whose own work investigates activism and social justice issues, challenged the artists to consider taking ‘eco-balanced approaches to creativity’ in future work.’ The November show included photographs and mixed media. A May juried show will feature paintings and sculptures. PPAA meets once a month, September through May, at the Woman’s Club. The club also hosts an annual Village Green Art Fair. Annual dues are $50. To see a directory of local artists and their work, visit: www.paliart.com. ‘SUE PASCOE

When I was in fourth grade, I attempted to construct a California Mission from flour, water and salt. I fashioned my model, painted it and over time watched its walls crack and crumble. It turns out that my mission had more similarities with the authentic adobe prototypes than I could have known.   In ‘The California Missions: History, Art and Preservation,’ published by the Getty Conservation Institute, we discover the limits of adobe, the all-but-vanished colorful embellishments on the mission facades, and the near disappearance of California’s oldest and richest historical legacy.   The Getty project was originally conceived in 1995 by the late Edna Kimbro, a renowned architectural conservator and historian, as an architectural history of the missions for the Getty’s Cultural Heritage series. After the project was fairly underway, Kimbro, who had been battling cancer for years, passed away, leaving the book in the hands of co-author Julia Costello, an expert on archeology and cultural resources with an expertise in the missions. Kimbro had completed the chapters on architecture and sculpture, while Costello filled in the history of the missions, the mythology that attached itself to that history, and the restoration efforts over the decades.   ’The books for popular consumption tend to carry the story of the missions to about 1850 and then stop the story there,’ says Tevvy Ball, an editor with Getty Publications.   Ball encouraged Costello to expand the scope of the book by bringing readers up to date on the new information that incorporated more recent academic work and the contributions of Native Americans.   ’I was encouraged to tell the richer history,’ Costello says, by sorting out the two opposing stories that have dominated the literature, from the demise of the mission system after the Mexican Revolution in 1821 to the present.   On the one hand, there is the romance of the missions, promulgated by California boosters who presented the mission era as a lost golden age; where the Indians were always good and the padres were always kind.   The other story characterized the missions as institutions of enslavement, and blamed the Christians for decimating the missions’ indigenous populations.   ’Neither of these two stories is the truth,’ Costello says. ‘Indeed, all those things happened in different time frames and different places. The padres were like captains of the ship and ran the missions like little fiefdoms. Some of them were ill tempered, while others were like the padre at San Juan Capistrano, who learned the Indian languages and wrote down their customs and beliefs.’   The story of the missions begins with Spanish expeditionary forays in the mid-18th century. The Spanish government secured dominance of the California coast, Alta California, by sending soldiers and missionaries to establish outposts in San Diego and Monterey. The model of colonization included three institutions: the military was charged with protecting the colonists from invasions and controlling native populations; the church was responsible for converting native peoples and educating them in European values; and the pueblos or ‘civilian towns’ attracted entrepreneurs.   Each mission complex was vast, often covering hundreds of acres. The casco (center of the community) included the church, the convento or priest’s residence building’which often contained a reception room, an office with library, a kitchen, dining room, priests’ sleeping rooms, guest rooms, storerooms’and a private chapel.   The buildings on the other side of the mission quadrangle, those connecting the church and convento wings, contained workshops, storage areas; and the monjerio, where the unmarried Christian mission Indian women resided under supervision. Outlying areas were reserved for gardens, orchards and industries, such as gristmills, tanneries and kilns. In addition, there were soldiers’ quarters and the rancheria (‘Indian village.’)   By 1829, the population of Mission San Luis Rey de Francia (in Oceanside), the largest of the mission establishments, numbered about 3,000 Indians, who were engaged in various vocations. While their industry contributed greatly to the material property of the colonists, the Catholic imposition upon them greatly disrupted their traditional customs, rituals and social practices.   The mission system was destined to fall apart when all material holdings were transferred to the citizenry. By the 1850s, mission lands had been acquired by Californio families through Mexican land grants, and the new Protestant American population showed little reverence for the remnants of the Catholic, Spanish past.   During the years of abandonment’the late-19th and early-20th centuries’artists were attracted to the ‘romantic’ stupor of the abandoned missions, which helped bring awareness of the mission heritage. Their work created a record of the physical establishments upon which subsequent restorations and historical studies were based.   At the same time, the romantic aura surrounding the mission life was encouraged by boosters, who were eager to attract visitors from across the country to California. Along with the decidedly commercial motives, travel literature often included appeals for the preservation of the missions.   A significant aid to the rediscovery of Old California was Helen Hunt Jackson’s 1884 novel ‘Ramona,’ which, while recasting history as a romantic myth, nevertheless helped to bring attention to the plight of the mission Indians, who suffered an even harsher life at the hands of farmers and miners.   The Getty book recognizes the high points of restoration and offers details about the invaluable work that was underwritten by the federal government during the Great Depression. Artists, largely unemployed, were hired to document the artistic, decorative and folk arts across America, which included a thorough inventory of mission art and historical objects. Artists working for The American Design Index produced renderings in watercolor, ink and colored pencil of the once-colorful murals and wall decorations, all but a few destroyed, by using clues from plaster fragments. A number of these drawings are reproduced in the book for the first time.   ’The California Missions’ describes the dazzling interiors of the mission churches, with their wealth of adornment’alter screens, paintings, statues’at first executed by artists imported from Mexico, but later by indigenous artists.   The history and science of preservation has undergone new definitions over the last 100 years. There was a time when restoration, or a complete rebuilding of structures, was desirable, such as with La Pur’sima Concepci’n de Maria Sant’sima (in Lompoc), which existed only as a ruin before being completely reconstructed in the 1930s for educational purposes. Others that were still marginally intact could be restored, retaining the character of the property as it appeared at a particular period.   ’In general, if you have something real, you want to use as much original fabric as possible,’ Costello says. ‘The real stuff has an aura and carries the story with it. Of the original 21 missions complexes, only 11 church buildings remain, and only six have interiors substantionally unchanged. (San Gabriel, San Francisco de As’s, San Miguel, Santa In’s, San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara.) Those six may not be the most pristinely restored, but they have the continuity of incense and prayers, as opposed to La Pur’sima, which is dead.   ’My hope for this book is that it will be useful for the future of the missions and inspire people to look and try and take care of and venerate them.’