People in colorful clothing dance barefoot around a maypole, weaving ribbons, during an outdoor festival. Spectators watch in the background under trees and tents on a sunny day.

Elemore Morgan Jr., Untitled, (Ribbon Dancers), 1976. Courtesy of the artist. © Elemore Morgan Jr.

Elemore Morgan Jr. — Photographs from the Festival of American Folklife, 1976

In the summer of 1976, the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife ran for twelve weeks on the National Mall as the centerpiece of the nation’s Bicentennial, the country’s 200th birthday. A collective of Cajun and Creole musicians from south Louisiana took to the stages as recognized bearers of a national heritage.

October 9, 2026 – February 20, 2027

Louisiana artist Elemore Morgan Jr. (1931-2008) traveled to the Festival in Washington, D.C. with his camera. Through his lens, the region’s living traditions are thrust into spaces of active culture exchange. He photographed the performers from home and the crowds who gathered to hear them. Morgan also moved beyond the festival stages to explore the demonstration areas, markets, and monuments. In the process, he observed Native American, Haitian, French, and Polish artisans, among others.

More than nostalgic records of an event, these images are both compelling works of art and valuable historical evidence. As compositions, the photographs reveal the artist’s eye for gesture, light and texture. Performers, audiences, and their interactions are framed with sensitivity, transforming moments of exchange into deep inflection points. The images celebrate the vitality of live performance while bringing the viewer closer to the relationships between people, place, and tradition. They are at once witness and interpretation, archive and artistic vision: a nation reflecting itself.

Elemore Morgan, Jr. is known for his landscape paintings, but he was constantly engaging the world with his camera. Its known that he brought visuals to the folklorists’ words, but he was telling his own story, the story of discovery, of the insatiable desire to understand America. He was gathering images much as Americans gather around a holiday or event. The 1976 folk festival images were intended to serve as references for his unrealized AMERICA PROJECT. An unquestionable openness and honesty are communicated.

On July 6, 1976, he wrote in his diary, “I must return, and above all, attempt to realize some of these American “ideas” as paintings. By sharing my slides frequently and getting to know these images, I believe I am stocking up my memory or imagination with my own special vocabulary of forms which, I hope and trust, will come out an uncontained composite, poetic images based on the experience of [illegible] in this part of the planet.”

By bringing together the aesthetic and the archival, this exhibition prompts visitors to consider the generative tension between record and artistic encounter. How do photographs shape a collective understanding of the past, yet allow for evolving and individualized truths? Printed for the first time from his original slides, these images appear publicly fifty years on, during America’s 250^th. Together they revisit the questions that originally drew Morgan to the Mall: what makes a people, and what holds their differences together? — a central conversation of our time.

Presented by the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and Festivals Acadiens et Créoles.

Curatorial Approach

These photographs document a moment in Louisiana’s cultural history. They are also the perspective of an artist. Neither fact yields to the other. The Hilliard’s curatorial approach begins with both at once.

A historian asks what a photograph shows: who is pictured, where, and when, and what the image tells us about the culture it records. That work is essential, and it grounds this exhibition. An art museum asks an additional question: how did the photographer see? Composition, light, gesture, the decision to frame one moment and let another pass. Elemore Morgan Jr. brought an artist’s eye to these images, and the exhibition is built around that eye.

In practice, this means images will be selected for their strength as photographs, not only their value as records. Interpretation will attend to Morgan’s choices as an artist while drawing on the historical and cultural context. The result will honor both what these photographs preserve and how they were made.

A woman in a patterned dress passionately sings and plays a resonator guitar at a microphone, with a child beside her. They are seated in front of a wooden wall.

Large crowd gathers around the Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., with the Washington Monument in the background, on a sunny day. People sit, stand, and relax, filling the area near the water.

A person wearing a red bonnet, red dress with white polka dots, and a white apron passionately sings or speaks into a microphone on stage, evoking the vibrant spirit often captured in the works of Elemore Morgan Jr.