I’d like to recommend a new exhibit “Kennedy to Kent State: Images of a Generation,” at the Worcester Art Museum, in Worcester, MA.  For those of you who have never been there, this museum with its top-notch cafe’, as well as the nearby American Antiquarian Society, are jewels in central Massachusetts.  The exhibit is an extensive set of photojournalistic images collected by Howard G. Davis, III to chronicle the period from 1958 to 1985.Thus, we have the civil rights movement, the space race, the Kennedy assassination, the war in Vietnam, Kent State, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones.

To those of us, who are of that generation, the images are not only iconic but haunting.  Revisiting pictures such a Eddie Adams’ “Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing the Viet Cong Guerilla, Bay Lop, 1968;” Bernie Boston’s “Flower Power,1967;” and Nick Ut’s “Children Fleeing South Vietnamese Air Force Napalm Attack on the Village of Trang Bang, 1972,” is absolutely viseral. These images changed America, and you are taken back to the first time that you saw them.  They are burned into your mind forever.  Ut’s image was originally censored, not because of the horror it depicted, but because it showed full frontal nudity.  Entering one of the little video booths to see the newsclips is terrifying.  You feel like you are about to be transported back to that formative time.

Honestly, it is powerful stuff!