A politically-engaged photographer, Ken Thompson worked during the 1960s for the General Board of Global Ministries, an organization connected with the United Methodist Church. He traveled throughout the United States to make visible many of the leading social and political issues of his day. Rarely exhibited or published, his photographs provide an eyewitness account of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, voter registration efforts in the South, the United Farm Workers in California, the aftermath of the Watts riot, conditions on the Cheyenne Indian reservation, and anti-poverty and anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C.

Programming

Gallery Conversation with historian Jennifer Scanlon

February 25, 2016 | 4:30 PM | Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Jennifer Scanlon, William R. Kenan Jr. professor of the humanities in gender and women's studies and interim dean for academic affairs, leads a discussion in the exhibition Dissent in 1960s America: The Photography of Ken Thompson. The discussion focuses on civil rights leader Anna Arnold Hedgeman, who is included in Thompson's work and is the subject of Scanlon's new book, Until There is Justice: The Life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman.