About Boots on the Ground
On Display until August 4, 2013, Boots on the Ground includes work from the Charlotte Observer's Mark Washburn and Gerry Broome, a reporter and photographer embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. Bolstered by the addition of selected works from UNC-Charlotte art professor Marek Ranis, visitors can gain a better sense of what it's truly like to walk around Iraq.
Unique to Boots on the Ground is the perspective of Ráed Al-Rawi, an artist who left Iraq in 1980 to avoid its war with neighboring Iran and later became an American citizen. In 2004, after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Al-Rawi was able to return to Iraq for the first time since he left almost two and a half decades before. His photographs from his return to his home country are an invaluable addition to the exhibit.
Photographs from Jared Rorrer, a Bank of America executive serving as a North Carolina Army National Guard officer, round out the exhibit. During his year-long deployment, Rorrer led long-distance supply convoys, a job fraught with peril, especially as the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) became the weapon of choice among insurgent forces.
About Fighting for Democracy
A traveling exhibit which was first presented at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in Los Angeles, Fighting for Democracy will be on display at Levine Museum until July 14, 2013. This exhibit follows the lives of 7 American men and women from minority backgrounds who fought for freedom in the Second World War despite the inequalities and lack of freedoms they faced at home.
Chronicling their experiences from pre-war to post-war, visitors gain perspective on how the events of World War II forever changed these individuals and their communities as they yearned for equal rights and opportunities.
To learn more about Levine Museum of the New South, visit their website -- http://www.museumofthenewsouth.org/
