Exploring Primary Sources: Four Days in May: The Vietnam War Experience at UK

A new exhibit by Kentucky artist Erica Meuser, “Kent State/May 4: The Making of an American Tragedy in Art,” is on display now at William T. Young Library through the end of the summer. The multimedia exhibit centers on the events of May 4, 1970, in which the Ohio National Guard shot thirteen students protesting the Vietnam War at Kent State University, killing four, and the subsequent protests that occurred on the University of Kentucky campus and colleges around the country. As a whole, Meuser’s work considers the complicated process through which tragic events are collectively remembered or forgotten.

The exhibit, curated as a walking tour, begins in the Rose Street entrance of Young Library, winds its way behind the central staircase into Core 1, and then descends the stairs into the Basement. “The experience can change depending on where the viewer enters the exhibit,” said Meuser. “There’s no right way to see it.” 

Comprised of paintings, videos, charcoal drawings, textiles, objects, and photo prints, Meuser’s work blurs the line between past and present by highlighting visual and auditory motifs that recur across media and across time: the female artistic gaze, looking out from behind a camera or out of a window; chiming bells and blooming trees; guns, militarism, and the university campus; mothers and American boyhood; innocence in the face of violence; and the fragile connection between memory and place. By walking through the exhibit, viewers experience “flickers” of images, objects, and textures, passing in and out of awareness “just like memory,” said Meuser.

Meuser, who lived in Kent, Ohio while her mother was an art student at the university, remembers walking home from school on the day of the shooting. “I was nine years old. There were tanks rolling down the streets,” she said. The tragedy, and the relationship it forged between herself, her mother, and the place they once called home, has long been a fixture of her work. “I think about May 4 all the time,” she said. “Walking across the UK campus, it’s always on my mind.”