Three years after acquiring 244 photographs from The Gordon Parks Foundation, Howard University opened an exhibition presenting Gordon Parks’ exploration of Black religious life from the 1940s to the 1980s.
Gordon Parks was a photographer, director, musician and activist in the mid-to-late twentieth century known for his portrayal of Black American life in his art. The exhibit is featured in Founders Library and will be available until December.
According to the National Gallery of Art, Parks “shaped the times in which he lived as much as he was shaped by them.”
The exhibition, “Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival,” consists of 40 photographs over seven sections that portray a chronological journey of what School of Divinity Dean Kenyatta R. Gilbert described as Parks’ “homiletical photography,” or photos that preach through the camera.
The subject matter of the photos ranges from the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal church, The Nation of Islam, the set of The Color Purple and the spiritual constitution of figures like Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.
“There is a little bit for everyone here,” said Dr. Melanee Harvey, the exhibition’s curator and an associate professor of art history.
The exhibition will be in Founders Library until Dec. 1, and Harvey shared that the planning of the showcase took much longer than the months it will be on view.
Harvey first presented on Parks’ religious photography in 2019 for the National Gallery of Art. This initial presentation started Harvey on a journey of investigating Gordon Parks’ work.
She said he serves as a case study for how “we document not only religious traditions but community,” and how African Americans have a history of being patrons of the arts beyond “the plantation and the projects.”
Four years later, in 2023, the Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard University awarded Harvey the Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing. The fellowship provided her with the resources to conduct research for the exhibition and write a book and a series of essays on photography.
The fruits of her years-long labor are now on view for the general public, not only as an exhibition but also as a study collection for students to be inspired by and reflect upon. The only other Gordon Parks study collection is located at Yale University.
Students can access all photos in Howard’s collection digitally online or through the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.
Director K.E. Coney-Ali of the Howard University Gallery of Art was a thought and design partner for the exhibition.
Coney-Ali said she worked closely with Dr. Harvey to “evoke emotion, so every placement of an image in the room has to connect and communicate to build a living, breathing space.”
The room was designed to convey a visual narrative of Parks’ life and career.
“You’re looking at the artwork, the photographs, through the lens of Gordon Parks and what he had seen: the spirit of the subject matter,” she said.
Gillian “Bantu” Joseph, a senior cinematography major from Brooklyn, New York, was a student volunteer for the exhibition. She said volunteering for the exhibition helped her appreciate the work of curators.
“It takes a lot of patience, a lot of taste and artistic vision. Everything here has been designed and thought through,” she said.
Joseph also said Parks’ work helped her appreciate the spiritualities and religious practices of Black people as a form of survival and mutual aid.
The main reason Howard purchased the collection for “a little bit over the million dollar mark,” according to Harvey, is to introduce Parks’ work to a broader range of people, especially those who seek to learn.
Henry Price, a freshman biology major and chemistry minor from Chesterfield, Virginia, said Gordon Parks inspires him as a fellow photographer.
“His images just catch my eye, both due to things like his double exposure technique and because he was tapped into the culture of the places he was going,” Price said.
Price encourages fellow students to attend the gallery.
“It doesn’t matter if you went to an AME church like I did,” he said. “There are universal things you can learn from these images.”
Harvey said the universality of spirituality is one of two main takeaways from the exhibition.
The other takeaway Harvey said is that, like Gordon Parks, who was mostly self-taught, anyone can pick up a camera and be a documentarian.
“It’s kind of ironic that this exhibition goes up at this time in our nation, where culture and history is under attack,” Harvey said. “With the intense police and military presence in D.C.”
During the reflection roundtable before the official opening of the exhibition, Rev. Bernard L. Richardson, dean of the Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel, summarized the takeaway with one question and a call to action. He encouraged the audience to reflect.
“What would Parks capture if he could lift his camera today?” Richardson said.
Copy edited by Damenica Ellis
