Exhibitions

Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks

April 24–June 28, 2009
Main Gallery

Gordon Parks, American Gothic, 1942, gelatin silver print. The Capital Group Foundation, L10.05.2002. © The Gordon Parks Foundation. 

Experience iconic images of the 20th century, from moving photographs chronicling the devastating grip of poverty and the arduous struggle for civil rights to powerful portraits of social and cultural leaders such as Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Leonard Bernstein, all captured through the camera lens of pioneering African American artist Gordon Parks (1912–2006).

A celebrated film director, author, poet, composer as well as a photojournalist, the barrier-breaking Parks selected the 73 photographs in this exhibition as his most powerful imagery before his death.

An exhibition catalogue with an essay by Maren Stange and 73 plates is available at Block in Print, the Block’s gift shop.

Watch a story on this exhibition on the NBC Chicago website or read a review of the exhibition in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Related Events

• Three American Photographs: In-Depth. The Block Museum explores the work of Gordon Parks, Robert Mapplethorpe, and John Swope with a series of educational programs to complement our exhibitions. Find out more about Gordon Parks on our Three American Photographers page.

• Tours. Free guided tours of the exhibition will take place Saturdays and Sundays at 2 pm from April 25 to June 28 (There will be no tour on Saturday, June 6).

• Block Cinema: Gordon Parks. Screenings include the semi-autobiographical The Learning Tree and the urban action hit Shaft, which will be introduced by Parks’s son, David Parks. More information can be found on the Block Cinema page.

• Gordon Parks and His Artistic Process, Photography, Film, and Writing. Gordon Parks’s son David Parks discussed his father’s work on Thursday, May 7. David Parks is a photographer (Life and Look magazines), author (GI Diary), and filmmaker. Video from this event is available on the Block Museum's podcast page. You can read an interview with David Parks on the Block Museum's news page.

• Gordon Parks: A Renaissance Man. A panel discussion was held on May 16 with Bob Black, cofounder and vice president of the Chicago Association of African American Photographers; Philip Brookman, director of curatorial affairs, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; Darlene Clark Hine, chair and professor, Department of African American Studies, and professor of history, Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University; and Maren Stange, associate professor, The Cooper Union, New York, NY. An audio podcast of this event is available on the Block Museum's podcast page.

• Gallery Talk. Block Museum senior curator Debora Wood led an in-gallery discussion of Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks on Thursday, May 28.

Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks was organized by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue are made possible by generous support from the Capital Group Foundation, the Cantor Arts Center’s Hohbach Family Fund, and Cantor Arts Center members. Its presentation at the Block has been generously supported by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York. Additional funding has been provided by the Myers Foundations and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. Educational programming in conjunction with Bare Witness is part of Three American Photographers: In Depth, a series of programs at the Block Museum sponsored by the Terra Foundation for American Art with additional support from the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Northwestern University.