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.  

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 and figures 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 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 will be available at Block in Print, the Block’s gift shop.

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. Note there will be no tour on Saturday, June 6.

• Gordon Parks and His Artistic Process, Photography, Film, and Writing. Gordon Parks’s son David Parks will discuss his father’s work and legacy on Thursday, May 7 at 6 pm. A podcast will be available a few weeks after this event.

• Gordon Parks: A Renaissance Man. A panel discussion 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; Maren Stange, associate professor, The Cooper Union, New York, NY; and Deborah Willis, chair and professor, Department of Photography and Imaging, New York University. Saturday, May 16, 2–4 pm. A podcast will be available a few weeks after the event.

• Gallery Talk. Block Museum senior curator Debora Wood will lead an in-gallery discussion of Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks. Thursday, May 28, 6 pm.

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.