Main Lines
Bicentennial City Visitors to the Bicentennial City exhibition are greeted with a wide-screen presentation of its namesake documentary, spanning the entire back wall of the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery.
2
Haverford Magazine
I
n the dimly lit gallery, the first-person narration echoes: “1976 created a space of wonder in me. It was the first time that the city of Philadelphia deeply engaged me. It was a year of marching bands; tall ships; crappy red-white-and-blue-painted fire hydrants; all manner of hoopla; Philly Pride; and wacky, wonderful, larger-than-life, room-sized birthday cakes.” That voice belongs to Assistant Professor of English Thomas Devaney, and the story he tells is the one explored in Bicentennial City, a Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery exhibition that takes its name from its centerpiece documentary. In 1976, Philadelphia played host to what was meant to be a sort of “World’s Fair” that welcomed visitors to the city to ring in the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. With projections anticipating 20 million visitors,
the city braced itself to take center stage in the nation’s celebration. In reality, the Bicentennial in Philadelphia came to represent fractured power structures and knotty understandings of patriotism, as revealed in Devaney’s voice-over. The exhibition, which ran through March 20, grew out of the 2019 summer DocuLab program, sponsored by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities. Under Devaney’s leadership five Bi-Co students (Julia Coletti ’21, Jixin Jia ’21, Eddie Ogborn ’19, Cole Sansom ’19, and Grace Sue BMC’20) joined forces to capture the complex spirit of the 1976 Bicentennial in a documentary. The resulting 40-minute film explores the previously untold stories of those affected by the tidal wave of the Bicentennial 34 years ago. “In 1976 there was fatigue and there was exhaustion, the city was on the ropes,” said Devaney. “There were great expectations for the
