UB joins gallery in "Fifties" exhibit
Jackson heads effort to offer collateral events, displays to enrich Albright-Knox exhibit

By Donna Longenecker
Reporter Assistant Editor

The 1950s, seen through the eyes of baby-boomers and their children, appear swaddled in innocence. Fueling that notion are "Nick-at-Nite," reruns of shows like "Father Knows Best" and "Ozzie and Harriett."

However, those who lived during the decade often tell a different story of very real, atomic-sized anxieties fostered by Cold War paranoia, Hollywood blacklists and Civil Rights marches.

To shed new light on a time marked by major changes in the cultural landscape, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery will present "The Tumultuous Fifties: A View from The New York Times Photo Archives," Jan. 26-April 7, featuring nearly 200 vintage photographs.

In conjunction with this exhibit—and at the request of Albright-Knox curator Doug Dreishpoon—UB faculty member Bruce Jackson has put together a variety of collateral exhibits and events. Working with UB colleagues, Jackson has assembled a unique collection of 1950s memorabilia and artifacts, and has organized a five-week "fifties" film series. He also will participate in a panel discussion at the Albright-Knox, and will teach a course at UB titled "The Fifties," which will feature texts, poetry, films and lectures by experts on various cultural, social and political topics related to the period.

Other activities at the museum affiliated with the exhibit will include a poetry reading at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 6 by Robert Creeley, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities in the UB Department of English, and a concert of 1950s music at 2 p.m. Feb 10. Both events will be at the Albright-Knox.

Jackson, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor of American Culture in the Department of English, says the 1950s often mistakenly are viewed as a time of "crinoline and virgins."

However, the one constant of the period, says Jackson, "was the Cold War—it kept Congress busy, provided the rationale for funding the interstate highway system, gave television producers real-life and fictive things to put on the air, spurred federal aid to higher education and continued support for military research."

Jackson assembled "The Material Fifties," a collection of the physical world depicted in The New York Times photos, with the help of UB colleagues. The collection, which will be on display in the museum during the same time as the Times photos, will focus on a country forever changed by the creation of the interstate highway system, the passage of the GI Bill and communist witch hunts, as well as the advent of rock-and-roll, Abstract Expressionism and Beat poetry.

The Arts and Sciences Libraries loaned items from the George Kelley Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection, and created a continuously running computer-based show of 1950s print advertising, including photos of signage still in existence.

Mike Lavin, associate librarian in Lockwood Library, provided items from his personal comic book collection, and several first editions of "Beat" texts authored by Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Lee (pen name of William S. Burroughs) were supplied by the Poetry/Rare Books Collection.

The exhibit also will include a recording of Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" and Elvis's first L.P., and a rare, cherry-red 1952 Harley.

The film series, "Screening the Fifties," also organized by Jackson, will be held at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, beginning Feb. 14, in the Albright-Knox auditorium.

The films, to be introduced by Jackson, are "Forbidden Planet," 1956, directed by Fred McLeod Wilcox, Feb. 14; "A Streetcar Named Desire," 1951, directed by Elia Kazan, Feb 21; "The Killing," 1956, directed by Stanley Kubrick, Feb 28; "Point of Order," 1964, directed by Emile de Antonio, March 7, and "Singin' in the Rain," 1952, directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, March 14.

Jackson says the films chosen for the series each relate to specific photographs and general themes in the Times exhibit.

"They each represent what I think is an important aspect of filmmaking of that decade," he says. "'Point of Order' is composed entirely—except for one very brief shot—of kinescope footage of the Army-McCarthy hearings a decade earlier; it is the single film that show us what Sen. McCarthy was and how he destroyed himself.

"'Forbidden Planet' is a science fiction film, but one that could only have been made during the Cold War, only a few years away from the trauma of Sputnik, the Soviet orbiter," he notes. "Space was very much on our minds in that decade, which is why, a few years later, John Kennedy would make such a big deal of it."

Marlon Brando, "who a lot of younger people think of either as the whale in 'Apocalypse Now' or the puffy-cheeked don in the 'Godfather,'" was, in those years, one of the sexiest and most compelling actors in film, Jackson said. "And 'Streetcar' was the film in which everyone got the point."

"The Killing," he pointed out, is a crime film and Stanley Kubrik's first major film, "at once a classic film noir and a film with a sense of time and space very much grounded in the fifties."

"'And Singin' in the Rain' is the greatest musical film of that decade, and of several others."

Jackson also will participate in a panel entitled "Picturing the Fifties: A Roundtable Discussion," set for 7:30 p.m. Sunday in the Albright-Knox auditorium. Other panelists will be Dreishpoon; Alan Trachtenberg, a professor at Yale University who organized the Times exhibit with Dreishpoon, and Nancy Weinstock, special project picture editor for The New York Times.