Jack Shainman Gallery Stages Gordon Parks Retrospective — SkimNews
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- Jack Shainman Gallery presents "Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror" in New York to mark the 20th anniversary of the Gordon Parks Foundation, which Parks co-founded with Life magazine editor Philip B Kunhardt Jr in 2006.
- The exhibit includes reflections from families of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, Alice Walker, her daughter Rebecca Walker, Bryan Stevenson, Ava DuVernay, and Hank Willis Thomas on Parks's most resonant photographs.
- Lonnie Ali highlights Parks's 1966 photographs of Muhammad Ali in London — including a pensive image of Ali leaning against a staircase in a suit — as intimate portrayals that revealed Ali's "human side," calling both men "warriors in their own way."
- Kyle Johnson, who starred as Newt in Parks's 1969 film The Learning Tree — the first major Hollywood studio film directed, produced and scored by a Black filmmaker, adapted from Parks's 1963 autobiographical novel — describes a leaf photograph from Parks's "Arias in Silence" as possessing a "sense of life or afterlife."
- Rebecca Walker dissects a Parks photo of a Black middle-class father and children approaching an ice cream stand marked "White" and "Colored," praising Parks for "leading with the humanity" rather than the brutality of segregation.
- Hank Willis Thomas frames Parks's work as an ongoing project of empathy rooted in his early government-era assignment including American Gothic, arguing Parks "was making history, not copying it" in every frame.
- The exhibit runs at Jack Shainman Gallery until 6 November.
Why it matters: The exhibit reframes Parks not as a historical figure but as an active artistic force, with contemporary figures like Ava DuVernay and Hank Willis Thomas claiming his visual language of dignity and decisive-moment photography as a living inheritance rather than a closed archive — positioning his work as a continuing project of empathy rather than a static record.
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