How apt that an exhibition exploring Bob Dylan’s engagement with political and social justice should land in New York’s Greenwich Village. It was here, after all, where the musician lived and worked in the 1960s, and where he emerged with his first politically charged folk songs. They were numbers that aligned him—then and forever—with the era’s burgeoning civil rights and anti-war movements. “I’m just writing it,” he said in 1962, “as something to be said, for somebody, by somebody.”
Opening in August at New York University’s Gallatin Galleries, “How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961–1964” revisits how the winds of change and protest intersected with (and inspired) Dylan’s early career. The show, which originates from the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, brings together a host of archival material and nine newly created documentary films that explore the songwriter’s response to current events.
Town Hall flyer, 1963. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
“The exhibit centers on Dylan’s music as a lens through which to view some of the most defining events of the 20th century,” curator Mark Davidson said in a statement. “The early ’60s were a time of rapid change for America, and Dylan paced alongside, documenting.”
These changes were spurred on by campaigns for desegregation, organizations around fair housing and voter registration, student protests, and marches demanding meaningful civil rights laws. Dylan registered these events in piercing compositions that, as he wrote in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, “didn’t come gently to the shore.”
Joan Baez and Bob Dylan perform at a rally during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963. Photo: Rowland Scherman / National Archive / Newsmakers.
“Paths of Victory” was a paean to civil rights marchers, and “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” mused on the nuclear threat, while “Masters of War” hit out at war profiteers. Other songs chronicled the racially motivated killings of Emmett Till, Hattie Carroll, and Medgar Evers. His most enduring folk songs arrived in the form of 1962’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and 1964’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which were less topical but universal in meaning.
The exhibition weaves the decade’s upheavals with Dylan’s music. Among the objects on view is rare footage of the 1963 voter registration drive in Greenwood, Mississippi, and the historic March on Washington (where Dylan and Joan Baez performed), along with photographs and ephemera from the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, during Dylan’s first visit to the event (where he arrived, curiously, with a bullwhip).
Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, Newport Folk Festival, July 28, 1963. Photo: Daryl Matthews. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
Fellow musicians who figured in Dylan’s early career—including Baez, Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and Len Chandler—will also be spotlit, as well as publications centered on topical songs and the protest movement, such as Broadsheet.
“The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s is an important part of our national consciousness,” Davidson told when the exhibition opened at the Bob Dylan Center, “and we have a unique ability to talk about that story through the songs that Dylan was inspired to write during those years.”
Carnegie Hall flyer, 1961. Courtesy of American Song Archives.
This phase of the music icon’s trajectory was recently adapted for the big screen in A Complete Unknown (2024), which starred Timothée Chalamet as a young Dylan. The film dramatized the songwriter’s time within New York’s folk circles as he rose through and then outgrew the protest movement and the traditional folk genre. Chalamet clinched a Golden Globe award for his work on the film.
The NYU show, part of the school’s new Arts and Impact initiative, is complemented by a guided walk through Greenwich Village on September 20. The route will take participants through the neighborhood’s sites and locations that are central to Dylan lore—Great Jones Street, Washington Square Park, the Chelsea Hotel—before concluding at iconic folk haunt the Bitter End.
“How Many Roads: Bob Dylan and His Changing Times, 1961-1964” is on view at the Gallatin Galleries, 1 Washington Place, New York, August 25–October 15.
Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com
