The show consists mostly of evocative black-and-white photographs made by Joel Jacobson and Tom Zetterstrom, who were members of the New Thing crew. Many of the pictures have never before been exhibited.
Also included are a short video collage of still photos and inspirational quotations, plus a selection of New Thing-related posters, record albums and a book, arrayed in a vitrine alongside pencils and pens. (The pens are definitely not from 1966-72.)
A Boston native, Colin Anthony Carew attended Howard University, where he joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Among his SNCC activities was registering Black voters in Mississippi during 1964’s “Freedom Summer.” He studied at Howard’s architecture school but withdrew in his senior year because he objected to the class project: designing a residence for the U.S. vice president. Carew became a fellow at the then-new Institute for Policy Studies, a wellspring for both national and local political activism.
At a Feb. 10 museum talk, Carew remembered that the New Thing’s first location, near 18th and Florida NW, was around the corner from IPS’s offices. The center soon became a place where kids from the Adams Morgan and Shaw neighborhoods, then predominantly Black, could learn art, music, dance and writing. Among Carew’s artistic collaborators were such local luminaries as flutist Lloyd McNeill, singer Roberta Flack, saxophonist Andrew White, and African drummer, dancer and choreographer Melvin Deal. Also a visual artist, McNeill was the New Thing’s first art teacher.
One of Carew’s goals was to offer an African American alternative to “the neo-European aesthetic that was the veil over Washington,” according to a remark included in the show’s text.
Still, “I used to get heat because our organization was not all Black,” Carew recalled on Feb. 10. Some collaborators, including Jacobson and Zetterstrom, both of whom appeared at the museum talk, were White. (Zetterstrom was classified as a conscientious objector to the draft and worked at the arts center instead of serving in the military.) So was Claudia Weill, who co-directed a New Thing short, 1970’s “This Is the Home of Mrs. Levant Graham,” before making an indie-cinema hit, “Girlfriends.”
“I had decided that, as Black as I was, I was not anti-White,” Carew said.
To promote their organization and their neighborhood, the New Thing staffers made short films, which led Carew to his lifetime career as a movie and TV producer, director and screenwriter. His credits include the 1983 film comedy “D.C. Cab” and the 1992-1997 sitcom “Martin,” starring Martin Lawrence.
Facing financial and other pressures and concerned about the aging grandmother who had raised him, Carew returned to Boston. The New Thing was always a team effort, Carew emphasized at his museum talk, but it didn’t survive long after his departure.
The American University exhibition was organized by students from the Digital Media Academy at D.C.’s Jackson-Reed High School, guided by Assistant Principal Marc Minsker and curator Britt Oates.
The photos on exhibit at the American University Museum don’t document the full range of the New Thing’s activities. They primarily depict children and musicians, often in close proximity. Young faces gaze raptly at Stevie Wonder, performing outside at 18th and Florida in 1967, and a boy smiles up at the trombone that’s pointed right down at him at a Marie Reed Elementary School program in 1969. Inspiration seems to crackle between performer and child.
Interestingly, many of the people who appear in these photos are unidentified. “New Perspective on the New Thing” is a nice introduction, or reintroduction, but the Adams Morgan arts center is clearly a subject that requires further research.
New Perspective on the New Thing: A Photography Exhibition Documenting D.C.’s Revolutionary Community Arts Center, 1966-1972
American University Museum, Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave. NW. american.edu/cas/museum. 202-885-1000.
