Displaying items by tag: gordon parks

Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the most celebrated African-American photographers of all time, is the subject of a new exhibition of groundbreaking photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott" (January 17–September 13, 2015) traces Parks’ return to his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas and then to other Midwestern cities, to track down and photograph each of his childhood classmates. On view in the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing, the exhibition’s 42 photographs were from a series originally meant to accompany a Life magazine photo essay—but for reasons unknown, the story was never published. The images depict the realities of life under segregation in 1950—presenting a rarely seen view of everyday lives of African-American citizens in the years before the Civil Rights movement began in earnest. One of the most personal and captivating of all Parks’ projects, the images, now owned by The Gordon Parks Foundation, represent a rare and little-known group within Parks’ oeuvre.

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta is mounting an exhibition this fall of important photographs by Gordon Parks, some of which have never been publicly exhibited, museum officials announced Tuesday. “Gordon Parks: Segregation Story” will be on view from Nov. 15 through June 7, 2015.

The exhibition, presented in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation, showcases more than 40 of Parks’s color prints. Most are on view for the first time in over half a century. They were created for a 1956 Life magazine photo essay, called “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” which chronicled the daily lives of an extended African-American family living in segregated Alabama.