'Gordon Parks' exhibition closes Monday

Gordon Parks, Two Negro boys shooting marbles in front of their home. November, 1942, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.  Southwest of the U.S. Capitol, the area's homes were soon torn down in an urban renewal project and replaced by temporary government buildings and new housing, The destruction of housing for impoverished people still leaves a bad taste among many in the nation's capital and often comes up for discussion in local news, even today.

In conjunction with Black History Month, the National Gallery of Art  has hosted the first exhibition of early works by one of the nation's finest social photographers, Gordon Parks (1912-2006), who overcame poverty and discrimination to excel at photography, music, writing, and film making. 

Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941, gelatin silver print, private collection, courtesy of and copyright, the Gordon Parks Foundation

 Gordon Parks, Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown's Home, Somerville, Maine, February, 1944, National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection

The exhibition, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950, closes Monday with more than 150 pictures Mr. Parks made of glamour queens, coal miners, Langston Hughes, and black life.  Documents from his own life are included.

Before Mr. Parks became the first black photographer at Life magazine, he worked for the U.S. government in Washington in the 1940s where he made life of black poverty visible to many through his pictures.

Gordon Parks, Washington, D.C. Young boy standing in the doorway of his home on Seaton Road in the northwest section. His leg was cut off by a streetcar while he was playing in the street, June, 1942, the Gordon Parks Foundation.  Mr. Parks was shocked by the discrimination he found in Washington:  young children forced to play in streets and excluded from "whites only" parks, playgrounds, and recreational centers.

Gordon Parks, a portion of Death Room, Fort Scott, Kansas, 1950, National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection

Gordon Parks, a portion of Tenement House, Arsonia, Connecticut, 1949,
National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection

Gordon Parks, a portion of Death of Babe Ruth, Inside Yankee Stadium, New York City, August, 1948, the Gordon Parks Foundation. Photographing the funeral of Bath Ruth was one of Mr. Parks's first assignments for Life magazine which published three of his pictures but not this one.  Why do you guess it was omitted?

Mr. Parks was a self-taught professional out of Kansas who was influenced by Charles White, Roy Stryker, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. After his mother died, he moved to St. Paul to live with his sister, but her abusive husband drove Mr. Parks to the streets where he lived homeless and sought warmth in streetcars where he slept.

He was one of the first to join the Civilian Conservation Corps and worked as a waiter on a railroad where a fellow waiter gave him a magazine that changed Mr. Parks's life.  In the magazine he saw photographs which awakened him to another life and a way up and out.  He began reading everything he could find about photography and took classes.

On Sunday, February 17 at 2 p.m. in the National Gallery's East Building Auditorium, Harry Allen, Nelson George, Adrian Loving, Miles Marshall Lewis, and Vikki Tobak will discuss Hip-Hop’s Great Day: Gordon Parks and a Legacy of Photographic Inspiration.

Films made by Gordon Parks will be screened at 12:30 p.m. February 22, February 27, and March 8, 2019, also in the East Building Auditorium. 

A signature catalogue ($48) of more 300+ pages and 168 of his photographs, which was produced and published by the Gordon Parks Foundation and Steidl working with the National Gallery, is available. Included are an extensive chronology of Mr. Parks's life, copies of pages of his photographs which ran in the St. Paul Recorder in Minnesota, and papers of his application for a fellowship to the Julius Rosenwald Fund which made Mr. Parks the first photographer to receive an award.

Nearby in other rooms at the National Gallery are pictures by another black photographer, Dawoud Bey, who has his own show,  The Birmingham Project, ending April 21, 2019:

Working in collaboration with the Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, N.Y., the National Gallery of Art organized both exhibitions.  Philip Brookman was the Parks's curator.

After Washington, the exhibition travels to the Cleveland Museum of Art, March 23–June 9, 2019; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, August 31–December 29, 2019; and Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, February 1–April 26, 2020.


What: Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950

When:  Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, 11 a.m.- 6 p.m. Open on Presidents Day.

Where: The ground floor of the West Building between Third and Ninth streets at Constitution Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. On the Mall.

Admission charge:  No charge 

Metro stations closest to the National Gallery of Art are the Smithsonian, Federal Triangle, Navy Memorial-Archives and L'Enfant Plaza.

For more information: 202-737-4215 

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