Brooklyn art prof remembers historic festival
160 artists participated in event at Brooklyn Museum
This month is the 50th anniversary of an event that, at the time, was unusual for the art world, for the Brooklyn Museum, and for a young graduate student at Pratt who suddenly was able to enlist some of the nation’s most famous artists and photographers in her cause.
The event was a benefit for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund at the Brooklyn Museum. It was the brainchild of then-MFA student Cynthia Dantzic; her friend Virginia Cantarella, a medical illustrator and painter; and Jan Swan, Dantzic’s landlady in Crown Heights and a microbiologist.
Last week, Dantzic, now a senior professor of fine art at Long Island University, visited the Eagle to talk about the event.
Dantzic, who grew up in Brooklyn and had graduated from Yale before studying at Pratt, was very supportive of the civil rights struggle that was then dominating the headlines. She thought of a fundraiser that would involve the art world and decided upon the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as a beneficiary. With few political or business connections, she and her colleagues approached the Brooklyn Museum with the idea.