Special Collections Research Center exhibit features artistic responses to Sacco and Vanzetti trial, execution

Special Collections Research Center exhibit features artistic responses to Sacco and Vanzetti trial, execution September 04, 2007Pamela McLaughlinpwmclaug@syr.edu

Syracuse University Library’s Special Collections Research Center has mounted the exhibition “The Never-Ending Wrong: The Execution of Sacco and Vanzetti” on the sixth floor of E.S. Bird Library. Viewing is available weekdays (except holidays) from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. through Dec. 31.

An opening celebration and reception will take place Thursday, Sept. 27, at 5 p.m. on the sixth floor, immediately following a 4 p.m. Library Associates lecture by Sean Quimby, director of the Special Collections Research Center. His lecture, “Phobia: Collecting in the History of Fear,” will take place in the Peter Graham Scholarly Commons on the first floor. The exhibition, reception and lecture are all free and open to the public. Parking is available in the University pay lots.

The exhibition commemorates the 80th-anniversary of the execution for murder of two Italian anarchist laborers, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. On display are period ephemera issued by the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and a plethora of books associated with the trial by Paul Avrich, Felix Frankfurter and Eugene Lyons, among others. The exhibition features artistic expressions (cartoons, illustrations, novels, plays, poems, songs and music) inspired by the trial, including the work of Maxwell Anderson, John Dos Passos, Fred Ellis, Howard Fast, William Gropper, Woody Guthrie, Rockwell Kent, Katherine Anne Porter, Pete Seeger, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Upton Sinclair.

For more information, visit the Special Collections Research Center site at http://library.syr.edu/digital/exhibits/s/SaccoVanzetti.