Josephine Baker is an icon. She was an international superstar and a human rights activist with great ideals: to convince the world that peace, freedom, and equality are universal human rights, regardless of skin color, religion, nationality, gender, or sexual orientation.

Josephine Baker was born in 1906 as an illegitimate child in a poor neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, and experienced segregation and racist violence as a child. According to Josephine Baker, at that time a girl had only three options to escape such living conditions: "as a maid, a prostitute, or a dancer." Thanks to her talent for performance, she made it onto the stage at just fourteen, moved to New York at fifteen, and in 1925, to Paris. At the height of the Roaring Twenties, Josephine Baker became an overnight sensation and embarked on her first world tour in 1928, which began in Vienna and was met with both acclaim and protest in every country. While conservative moralists denounced her as a “Black devil” and saw her as a threat to public decency, she performed night after night to sold-out audiences and became a source of inspiration for artists.

The exhibition Josephine Baker. Idol icon inspiration at the Francisco Carolinum, the House for Photography and Media Art, presents artworks, contemporary and pop-cultural film documents, as well as numerous original photographs and objects from the collection of the OÖLKG, alongside loans from private and public collections. It focuses on her early performances in Vienna, her path to becoming the first female superstar with African American roots, her fight against racism, and her rise to French national heroine: in 2021, Josephine Baker became the sixth and the first non-white woman to be inducted into the Panthéon in Paris – a posthumous recognition of her life’s work as a resistance fighter and freedom activist.

The exhibition is curated by Mona Horncastle, author of the biography Josephine Baker. World star. Freedom fighter. Icon (Molden 2020), curator of the exhibition Freedom. Equality. Humanity (Bundeskunsthalle Bonn 2023), and co-curator of the exhibition Icon in motion (Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin 2024).