This exhibit by artist Pamela Chatterton-Purdy pays tribute to those who risked physical harm, imprisonment and death for the sake of freedom: the dynamic leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.

This exhibit features nineteen of the artist’s icons, including two on loan from Trinity United Methodist Church and Green Mountain College.  Included are portraits of Martin Luther King Jr., Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, Ralph David Abernathy, Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Harry Belafonte, Jeffrey Brace, and State Representative Benjamin Swan, among others. The exhibit also includes a film about the development and evolution of this project.

Chatterton-Purdy, who has been deeply involved in the struggle for civil rights for over forty years, tells the stories of some of the Movement’s most important leaders through this series of iconic works. By using wooden panels constructed to look like medieval alter-pieces, or icons, and then painting portraits surrounded in gold, the artist has been able to tell those stories through works that evoke a deeply emotional, and perhaps even spiritual response.