Louis Draper “True Grace”

Bruce Silverstein (529 W 20th St.)

This event has ended.

Bruce Silverstein presents Louis Draper | True Grace. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of the artist’s work since announcing exclusive representation of the Louis H. Draper Preservation Trust.

Louis Draper was born in Virginia in 1935 and moved to Harlem, New York in 1957 where he enrolled at the New York Institute of Photography, studying under W. Eugene Smith. In 1960 Draper co-founded the Kamoinge Workshop in New York City. Translating to “group effort” from the language of the Kikuyu people in Kenya, Kamoinge sought to portray global African-American and African communities as having agency rather than being victimized by social and political oppression.

The unifying concern of Draper’s practice was to portray his subjects with respect, and what Draper referred to as “true grace”. Coming of age in the South, and living in New York City during the Civil Rights movement greatly impacted not only Draper’s politics, but also the kind of images he created, and how they served as their own form of resistance.

The exhibition will include over fifty gelatin silver prints spanning from the late 1950s through the 1990s.