Gordon Parks 'Voices in the Mirror' Exhibit Opens in NYC — SkimNews
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- Jack Shainman Gallery in New York is presenting 'Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror' through November 6, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Gordon Parks Foundation, which Parks co-founded with Life magazine editor Philip B Kunhardt Jr in 2006 and named after his 1990 memoir.
- Lonnie Ali, wife of Muhammad Ali and interim president and CEO of the Muhammad Ali Center, named Parks's 1966 London photograph of a pensive, suit-clad Ali leaning against a staircase as her favorite — calling it one of the more intimate portrayals of the champ.
- Kyle Johnson, who starred as Newt (Parks's fictional stand-in) in the 1969 film The Learning Tree — the first major Hollywood studio film directed, produced and scored by a Black director, adapted from Parks's 1963 autobiographical novel — recalled Parks's Arias in Silence photo of a leaf against a painted backdrop, saying the leaf 'has enough to suggest its previous existence as a human.'
- Rebecca Walker, writer and daughter of novelist Alice Walker, reflected on a Parks photo of a Black family at a segregated ice cream stand that initially reads as contemporary Black middle-class life before the 'White' and 'Colored' signs reveal the Jim Crow reality — praising Parks for 'leading with the humanity' rather than the brutality.
- Hank Willis Thomas pointed to Parks's American Gothic, made during his US government documentary work, as the origin of a lifelong project to use photography to 'create empathy and compassion' — arguing Parks was 'making history, not copying it' with every frame.
- The exhibit also gathers reflections from the families of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, Bryan Stevenson, Ava DuVernay, and Alice Walker on Parks's most resonant images.
Why it matters: By pairing Parks's archive with voices ranging from Lonnie Ali and Ava DuVernay to conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas, the exhibit positions Parks not as a historical curiosity but as an active reference point for contemporary Black creative and civil rights work — and the November 6 closing date gives visitors roughly two months to see it at Jack Shainman Gallery.
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