Witness Testifying, Montgomery Court
Date1956
Artist
Harvey Dinnerstein
(American artist, 1928–2022)
MediumGraphite on paper
Dimensionscomposition: 11 3/16 × 9 9/16 in. (28.4 × 24.3 cm)
sheet: 11 5/8 × 10 1/8 in. (29.5 × 25.7 cm)
sheet: 11 5/8 × 10 1/8 in. (29.5 × 25.7 cm)
Credit LineGift of the Robert Lehman Foundation Inc., 1994
Object number1994-60
On View
Not on viewClassificationsDRAWING
Label TextIn 1956, New York artist Harvey Dinnerstein and his fellow artist Burton Silverman recorded events of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, initiated when Rosa Parks, an African American woman, refused to give up her seat to a white man on the racially segregated city bus system. Together Dinnerstein and Silverman made over 90 reportorial drawings of the activities and people involved in the Boycott, including the twenty‑six year old Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Several of the drawings were published in magazines and exhibited in museums. The artists stated: “Our decision to record the events, as artists, was motivated in part by the virtual absence of photographic recording of the Boycott. We felt that this was the first real opportunity to show the efficacy of the artist's eye in evoking the emotional as well as factual realities of an important human event.”
