Time to Get Ready: Fotografía Social | Civil Rights Photography of Maria Varela

Time to Get Ready: Fotografía Social | Civil Rights Photography of Maria Varela opens at the Houston Public Library - Central on Tuesday, October 6, at 7 PM. It's a social photography exhibition organized by the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, and it brings together work by Maria Varela, an American photographer born in 1940 who spent decades documenting resistance movements from the inside.

Varela's career reads like a map of mid-century American activism. From 1963 to 1967, she was a staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working mostly in Alabama and Mississippi. There, she helped develop a voter literacy program, and by 1965 she'd become the organization's only female staff photographer. In 1968, she answered Reies Lopez Tijerina's call to join the Land Grant Movement in New Mexico, where she helped members set up co-ops and non-profits to restore ancestral lands and cultural practices. Varela describes her images as reflecting the evolution of resistance movements over nearly three decades—moving from demonstrations and political organizing to the building of alternative institutions.

These photographs have a long history of their own. They've appeared in books, magazines, television, and exhibitions for over sixty years, and her work is held by the National Museum of African American Art, the National Museum of Mexican Art, and the National Gallery of Art. Seeing them together in one space lets you trace that arc she talks about, from the front lines of the civil rights struggle in the South to the community-building work in the Southwest.

The exhibition is at the Central library, and admission is free. It opens Tuesday, October 6, at 7 PM.