Examining How Witnessing a National Tragedy on Television Impacts Memory, Psychological Well-Being and Emotional Development,
Colorful Memories: November 22 Through a Child’s Eyes presents Illustrated Memories from 1963
Dallas, TX – March 26, 2025 – This spring, The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza examines the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with an exhibition that explores the event and its aftermath through the perspectives of children. The only museum dedicated to the life, legacy, and assassination of President Kennedy, The Sixth Floor Museum presents Colorful Memories: November 22 Through a Child’s Eyes, on view March 26—January 4, 2026,within an interactive environment evoking a midcentury American classroom. The exhibition showcases a series of drawings that first-grade students in Prescott, Arizona completed in 1963 in response to the assassination, as well as the contemporaneous documentary film, A Child’s Eyes: November 22, 1963.
Following the assassination of President Kennedy, filmmaker and writer Richard Snodgrass undertook a unique project to understand how young children were perceiving and processing the historic moment in which they found themselves. As news of the assassination sent a shockwave through the nation on November 22, 1963, many schools released early so that students process the tragic breaking news alongside their families. The increasing prevalence of televisions in homes and the advent of the 24/7 news cycle meant that many children learned about the assassination through nonstop media coverage aired on CBS, ABC, and NBC—a historical first. Seeking to understand how their exposure to a violent national tragedy through the media had impacted the psyches of children more than a thousand miles from where the assassination took place, Snodgrass, a prize-winning documentarian who had previously won awards at film festivals for his examinations of contemporary issues like racism, divorce, and the nuclear arms race, partnered with a first-grade class at the Sacred Heart School in Prescott, Arizona to create a short film that captured the students’ understandings of the assassination. While directing the documentary, he also collected and preserved their illustrated memories of these events.
“The Sixth Floor Museum is a repository for information about the assassination, including the myriad responses from the local, national, and international communities,” said Museum CEO Nicola Longford. “Through our Oral History Project, we have recorded over 2,500 first-person accounts of the Kennedy assassination and life in the 1960s more broadly. With this exhibition, the Museum continues to give a voice to the people who bore witness to that momentous period of history.”
Colorful Memories brings together over 30 crayon-on-paper drawings by the class. With depictions ranging from the President and First Lady arriving at Love Field in Dallas on November 22,to the Texas School Book Depository building—today the home of The Sixth Floor Museum, and the location where the alleged sniper’s perch was found—and American flags flying at half-mast, the works in Colorful Memories demonstrate the impact and persistence of these key visual moments that the children were introduced to in newscasts and in print.
The works on view are a selection chosen from a recent acquisition of 70 such drawings that were donated to the Museum by the family of the project’s art director, Hank Richter. The donation also includes the short film A Child’s Eyes: November 22, 1963.