Artist marks milestones in Civil Rights struggle

The Civil Rights Movement of the '60s made a powerful impression on Pamela Chatterton-Purdy. And now the Harwich Port artist is creating a series of impressions from that era.

She is nearly finished painting a series of artworks that focus on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and on several of the milestone events that helped launch and sustain the movement.

Titled "Icons of the Civil Rights Movement," the work is about to become a traveling exhibit commemorating the movement and the 40th anniversary this year of King's assassination. The 12-piece exhibit (it may be expanded to 15 pieces) will have its first public viewing Saturday, Jan. 19, at St. Joan of Arc Church in Orleans, Mass., in a show sponsored by Nauset Interfaith Association.

For the artist and her husband, David Purdy, a retired Methodist clergyman, the civil rights movement "was critical in the influence of our lives over the past 45 years," Chatterton-Purdy says.

"The '60s and '70s were years of active protest. Not only did we go on marches for civil rights, but we took trips to Washington to protest the Vietnam War," she says.

The wood block paintings, done in acrylic over gold leaf, depict critical moments of the movement. For example, one titled "Emmett Till" shows a portrait of the 14-year-old African-American who was murdered in Money, Miss., in 1955. His murder has been cited as one of the key events that energized the movement. In the portrait, the young Till wears a friendly grin that belies the brutality of his murder - the teen had been shot, beaten and had an eye gouged out before he was dumped into the Tallahatchie River with a weight around his neck.

In "Little Rock Nine," Chatterton-Purdy paints a group of African-American high school girls accompanied by armed soldiers. It depicts what happened on Sept. 4, 1957 in Little Rock, Ark., when then-governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to block the nine students from attending the local high school for white students 2 1/2 years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.

Another work, "Bloody Sunday," memorializes the Selma to Montgomery (Alabama) march on March 7, 1965, when hundreds of civil rights marchers were attacked and beaten by state and local police.

Chatterton-Purdy and her husband lived in the Chicago area at the time of these events, and retired to Harwich Port in 1995. Her career as an art teacher brought her to the public schools of Brookline, and she has also taught at Bay Path College, Springfield College and at University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

The couple revisited some of those sites a few years ago.

"In 2004, my husband and I took a trip through the South, traveling with 100 high school students to all the milestone of the movement," Chatterton-Purdy says. "This civil rights sojourn ended with a visit to the Lorraine Motel, where Dr. King was murdered. [It] is now a powerful civil rights museum."