Exhibition: A Song for Unsung Heros: African American Soldiers in the Civil War

Special thanks to the Friends of Photography of the Cleveland Museum of Art for bringing this to my attention.

A Song for Unsung Heros: African American Soldiers in the Civil War

An exhibition of the work of photographer William Earle Williams

Williams will be in Akron to lecture on his work as part of the Bidwell Visiting Artist Lecture series on Wednesday, April 4 at 6 pm in the auditorium of

Folk Hall (150 E. Exchange St., Akron).

An opening reception for the exhibition will follow, from 7:30-9 pm. All events are free and open to the public.

The exhibition runs April 2 -25 in the Emily Davis Gallery of the Mary Schiller Myers School of Art, The University of Akron

Williams’ work in these photographs seeks to bring recognition to the contribution of African American troops to the Union victory. African American soldiers, who were over 180,000 strong, have been considerably underrepresented in the documentation of the Civil War. As Williams noted while creating the series Gettysburg: A Journey in Time (1986), the stories of the sites that serve as relevant landmarks in the story of minority soldiers were given little to no mention in historical documentation. The combination of these realities served as the motivation for Unsung Heroes, as he asked himself, “Are these sites not as equally important to our country’s history?” Williams’ responded by creating a pictorial documentation of these notable landmarks and a historical record of a forgotten national memory.

Williams was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003-2004, during which much of Unsung Heroes was created. Recently, Williams has been granted a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, as well as a Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Fellowship. His work has been exhibited in many major institutions, such as the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Smithsonian, and his photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Williams served on the national board of the Society for Photographic Education from 1997-2003. He is currently a professor of fine arts and curator of photography at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania, where he has been since 1978.