Wake Forest Professor Uses Art and Pop Culture to Explain the Power of the Kennedys

Wake Forest professor uses art and pop culture to explain the power of the Kennedys

Fifty years ago President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Today, many images of the Kennedys remain larger than life and continue to captivate.

David Lubin, Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University and author of “Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images,” draws on movies, TV shows, neoclassical paintings, modern works of art and designer fashions to show how the public came to personally identify with the Kennedys.

“The Kennedy images derive their power in good measure from their ability to activate latent memories of other powerful images in the histories of art and popular culture,” says Lubin. “Our perceptions of JFK and his era, not to mention our own, rely entirely upon endlessly replicated and infinitely elastic chains of images from art, literature, and the media that constantly inform us, often in contradictory ways, of who we are, who we ought to be and where we belong.”