NYAB Event - Gordon Parks "Centennial"

Gordon Parks "Centennial"

Howard Greenberg Gallery

This event has ended.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Gordon Parks, widely recognized as the most influential African American photographer of the 20th century, Howard Greenberg Galley in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation will present two simultaneous exhibitions of his work. Most noteworthy in the exhibitions will be a number of color prints from "Segregation Story," 1956, a limited edition portfolio with an essay by Maurice Berger. On exhibition for the first time, they were produced in 2012 from a group of transparencies only recently discovered in a storage box at the Gordon Parks Foundation.

"Gordon Parks: Centennial" will survey nearly 40 works spanning five decades of the artist’s career beginning in the early 1940s, including some of the legendary photographer’s most seminal images. Among the highlights in "Gordon Parks: Centennial" will be "American Gothic," 1942. Considered to be Parks’s signature image, the gelatin silver print depicts Ella Watson, a black woman who mopped floors at a government building. Astonished by the prejudice he encountered on his first day in Washington D.C., Parks struck up a conversation with Watson and heard about the difficulties she faced due to bigotry and discrimination. That day Parks himself had been refused service at a clothing store, restaurant, and movie theater. Watson agreed to be photographed by him, holding a broom behind an American flag. Park’s riff on the iconic 1930 painting of the same name by Grant Wood became the symbol of the burgeoning civil rights movement. Another image, "Muhammad Ali, Miami, Florida," 1966, shows the boxer looking tense and drenched in sweat. A color photograph of family waiting in front of an ice cream shop on a hot summer day, "Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama," 1956, is on view for the first time as part of the "Segregation Story" series taken for Life magazine.

[Image: Gordon Parks "The Invisible Man, Harlem, New York" (1952) gelatin silver print © The Gordon Parks Foundation. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery]