JOSEPHINE BAKER

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12 hours ago

Linz (ots) –

Josephine Baker is an icon. She was an international superstar and a human rights activist with great ideals: to convince the world that peace, freedom and equality are universal human rights, regardless of skin color, religion, nationality, gender or sexual orientation.

Josephine Baker was born in 1906 as an illegitimate child in a poor district in St. Louis, Missouri, and experienced segregation and racist violence as a child. According to Josephine Baker, a girl had only three options to escape this living environment: “As a maid, prostitute or dancer.” Thanks to her show talent, she made her on stage as a fourteen -year -old, at 15 she went to New York and in 1925 to Paris. At the height of the crazy 20s, Josephine Baker became a star overnight and went to her first world tour in 1928, which began in Vienna and was accompanied by jubilation and protest in all countries. While conservative moral guards disparaged as a “black devil” and saw a danger to public morality in it, she stood on stage every evening in front of sold -out houses and was discovered by artists as a source of inspiration.

The exhibition JOSEPHINE BAKER. IDOL IKONE INSPIRATION In the Francisco Carolinum, the house for photography and media art, is devoted to art, contemporary and pop cultural film documents as well as numerous original photographs and objects from the inventory of OölkG as well as loan from private and public collections in Vienna, her way to the first female superstar with African -American roots, the fighter against racism and finally French National heroine: In 2021, Josephine Baker was admitted to the Panthéon in Paris as the sixth and first non -white woman – a posthumous recognition of her life performance as a resistance fighter and freedom activist.

The exhibition is curated by Mona Horncastle, author of the biography Josephine Baker. World star. Freedom fighter. icon (Molden 2020) curator of the exhibition Freedom. Equality. humanity (Bundeskunsthalle Bonn 2023) and co-curator of the exhibition Ikon in Motion (New Nationalgalerie Berlin 2024).

11.04.-07.09.25

FRANCISCO CAROLINUM LINZ
Museumstraße 14

A-4020 Linz