By james art The building that houses the Baton Rouge Gallery on Dalrymple Drive in City Park was built in the 1920s as a pool house for a 20,000-square-foot pool, described as a public facility.
But in the pre-integration days, it wasn’t public at all.
Four decades later, in what was dubbed the “Baton Rouge Bathing,” 30 to 50 black men tried to enter the pool on July 23, 1963, in a demonstration that ended with the arrest of five of them.
As the 60th anniversary of that day approaches in the summer of 2023, the Baton Rouge Gallery, along with the nonprofit Dialogue on Race Louisiana and BREC, began developing an exhibit honoring these marchers.
“What happened here happened all over the country,” said Jason Andreasen, president and CEO of the Baton Rouge Gallery Center for Contemporary Art.
This week, the exhibit “And We Went: 60 Years After the Baton Rouge Swim” received a gold first-place award in the 2024 Southeastern Conference of Museums Exhibition Competition.
The conference spans a 12-state region and was held this year in Baton Rouge.
The exhibition “And We Went” ran from July 5 to 27, 2023 at the Baton Rouge Gallery and was curated by Jonelle Logan, executive director of the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art in Reston, Virginia.
The exhibition “honored the bravery of the individuals involved and sparked an honest conversation about the progress made (and not made) in the six decades since,” according to the gallery’s website.
Artists who participated in the exhibition were John Alleyne of New Orleans; Kimberly Beckout of Brooklyn; Aliyah Bonet of Raleigh, North Carolina; Justin Bryant of Little Rock, Arkansas; Malaika Favorite, from Geismar; Ronnie Henderson, of Columbia, South Carolina; Randell Henry of Baton Rouge; Juan Logan of Belmont, North Carolina; John Walton of New Orleans; Charles Williams, Durham, NC; and Andrew Wilson of Oakland, California.
The City Park Basin, as it was called, was closed and fenced in the 1960s and later filled in.
The award-winning exhibit, held at the Baton Rouge Gallery last summer, takes its name from the words of the Reverend Betty Claiborne, one of those arrested during the demonstration:
“This park was built with money from all the people who paid taxes in Baton Rouge, and we couldn’t figure out a reason why we couldn’t go. And we went.”