Exhibitions

Josephine Baker: Image and Icon

November 24, 2006 – March 18, 2007

Josephine Baker, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

National Portrait Gallery
8th and G Streets, NW
Washington, DC

2nd Floor, Northwest

See on Map Floor Plan

In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Josephine Baker's birth, this exhibition traces her important and innovative contributions to Jazz Age music and dance, the French resistance during World War II, and the Civil Rights movement worldwide through nearly 100 vintage photographs, posters, drawings, prints, and paintings. It also explores the development of her image—first as an exotic phenomenon in a mid-1920s Paris that was infatuated with African American culture, then as a glamorous cabaret star, and finally as a Civil Rights advocate for a world without ethnic and racial barriers.

Catalogue