Events

ALBA sponsors many educational activities promoting the history and legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. ALBA and affiliated organizations regularly schedule events open to the general public, including annual reunions, lectures, concerts, exhibits, and film screenings. The latest events include:

Exhibition Opening and Reception
Scenes of Bravery and Determination: Walter Rosenblum's Homage to the Spanish Republicans

In the fall of 1946, the New York photographer Walter Rosenblum--a student and friend of Paul Strand and Lewis Hine--traveled to Toulouse, France, to record the relief work undertaken by the Unitarian Service Committee for the thousands of Spanish refugees living there since the end of the Civil War, seven years earlier. He came back with a series of haunting portraits, 25 of which will be part of an exhibit at the King Juan Carlos Center.
"I had expected to find dejected and tired people," Rosenblum later wrote, "but instead discovered bravery and determination."

Thursday, January 22, 2009
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South
Free of Charge
RSVP here
Sponsored by Tamiment Archives, the King Juan Carlos Center, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. With special thanks to the Rosenblum family.

Visit the online version of this exhibit here.

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Film Screening and Discussion
Walter Rosenblum, In Search of Pitt Street

Veteran documentary filmmaker Nina Rosenblum's loving tribute to her father.
Walter Rosenblum, In Search of Pitt Street (Daedalus Productions, Inc., New Video, 1999) is an hour-long documentary about Rosenblum and his stunning photographs of D-Day, Pitt Street, Spanish Refugees, East Harlem, Haiti, Europe and the South Bronx are a recognized part of our national heritage.
Includes a panel discussion with Nina Rosenblum and historian of photography, Naomi Rosenblum.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South
Free of Charge
RSVP here
Sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the King Juan Carlos Center.

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 Film Screening and Discussion
Women in the Line of Fire in the Spanish Civil War and World War II

 In Spain during the 1930's, eighty American women were part of the International Brigade's 40,000 volunteers from fifty countries who came to fight for democracy against fascism and Franco. In Into the Fire, an enthralling, meticulously researched documentary by Julia Newman, sixteen of these brave and idealistic nurses, writers and journalists share stories of courage and commitment to a just cause.  This event also includes a screening of the twelve-minute teaser for Michele Fillion's No Job for A Woman: The Women Who Fought to Report World War II which tells the story of wire reporter Ruth Cowan, magazine writer Martha Gellhorn and photographer Dickey Chapelle who, along with 120 other accredited women reporters, helped forge our contemporary vision of what it means to report a war.

Into the Fire (2002), directed by Julia Newman
No Job for A Woman: The Women who Fought to Report World War II (in-production), directed by Michele Fillion
Includes a panel discussion with the filmmakers.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South
Free of Charge
RSVP here
Sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the King Juan Carlos Center.

The Undead: 
A Teach-in on the Spanish Civil War and the "memory debates" in Spain today

Coordinated by Professor James D. Fernández, with distinguished guests from a wide variety of fields.  Details to be posted.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Time: 5:00 pm
Place: King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South
Free of Charge
RSVP here
Sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the King Juan Carlos Center.

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 Symposium
Documenting Displacement: Images of Spanish Civil War Refugees

The United Nations has described the twentieth century as the century of the refugee. Wars, revolutions, decolonization and economic globalization have uprooted and displaced millions of people worldwide. The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) caused a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions—millions of displaced in Spain and more than 500,000 in France—that, like the war, was widely covered by photographers and filmmakers from around the world. Their heart-wrenching images of suffering, despair, courage, and determination were meant to inform the western public as much as to jolt it into political or humanitarian action. Never before had the human consequences of armed conflict been documented in such visual detail. How was the refugees’ story told initially, and how did that story change during World War II, after the defeat of fascism, and during the Cold War? Did the Spanish war mark the visual birth of the modern refugee?

This interdisciplinary symposium will feature seven speakers, more than an hour’s worth of rare documentary footage, and scores of unknown images of Spanish refugees from the recently recuperated archives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, and “Chim” Seymour .

Friday, May 1, 2009
Time: 3-9 pm
Place: King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South
Free of Charge
RSVP here
Sponsored by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, the King Juan Carlos Center, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain's Ministry of Culture & United States' Universities.