Chester Higgins “The Indelible Spirit”

Bruce Silverstein (529 W 20th St.)

[Image: Chester Higgins "Early morning coffee, Harlem" (1974)]

This event has ended.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery presents exclusive representation of Chester Higgins, as well as an upcoming solo exhibition in the gallery. The debut show will be curated by Carrie Springer, former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibition will feature gelatin silver prints spanning Higgins’s five decade plus career.

“Wrestling with issues of memory, place, and identity, I see my life as a narrative and my photography as its expression. My art gives visual voice to my personal and collective memories. It is inside ordinary moments where I find windows into larger meaning. Light, perspective, and points in time are the pivotal elements I use to reveal an interior presence within my subjects as I search for what I identify as the Signature of the Spirit.”
-Chester Higgins

Photographer and author Chester Higgins was born in Alabama in 1946, and was formally educated at Tuskegee University, graduating in 1970. Experiences with his family’s church community, as well as with college campus student protests, were formative in developing the direction of Higgins’s artistic practice. Higgins’s oeuvre portrays the dignity of the African American and African diasporic communities, and this work has brought Higgins all over the world, and to Africa in particular, many times.

Higgins worked as a staff photographer for The New York Times from 1975 until 2014, and is the author of several publications, including Black Woman (1970); Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994); Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging (2000); and Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey (2004). Higgins’s work has been the subject of many international exhibitions, and is held in notable collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Higgins lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Carrie Springer is an independent curator and writer. Formerly a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Springer has worked on exhibitions there for almost twenty years, in a variety of media. Most recently, in 2020-2021, she curated the Whitney’s installation of Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop. She also curated Vantage Points: Contemporary Photography from the Whitney Museum (for the Asheville Museum of Art); and Robert Rauschenberg: Five Decades from the Whitney’s Collection (for the Norton Museum of Art) in 2020-2021. Springer has a particular expertise in photography and has organized exhibitions of the work of Harold Edgerton, Edward Steichen, contemporary photographers influenced by F. Holland Day, and others. Springer also worked with Robert Gober on Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield; and collaborated on exhibitions with Frank Stella, Sherrie Levine, and numerous other artists.