Adger Cowans,
Footsteps, 1960. (Courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Aldine S. Hartman Endowment Fund / The Whitney Museum of American Art)
When the Kamoinge Workshop began in 1963, taking its name from a Kikuyu word meaning “a group of people acting together,” a few Black photographers had already gained some prominence. Gordon Parks was probably chief among them. After starting as a portraitist in Chicago, he had gone on to work during the war years with the renowned photography program of the Farm Security Administration, best known for sending the likes of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to document everyday rural life during the Depression; in postwar Harlem he went to work for
Reviews - January 14, 2021
In 2016, on the occasion of an exhibition of the photographs of Louis Draper at Steven Kasher Gallery, Hyperallergic critic John Yau asked, “Does the Museum of Modern Art Even Know about This Great Photographer?” Apparently, they didn’t. Although Draper, who had died in 2002, was a prominent Black photographer and one-time president of the Kamoinge Workshop, there was little evidence that New York’s august Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had paid much attention. MoMA’s communications director tersely informed Yau that the museum did, indeed, own photographs by Draper and other members of the Kamoinge Workshop. But they had been consigned to what was unceremoniously called the “study collection” work deemed “not appropriate for acquisition to the Collection.”
Black Art Matters
At the Whitney Museum, the enduring legacy of the Kamoinge photography collective 14 distinctive talents finally in the spotlight.
Ming Smith’s “America Seen Through Stars and Stripes,” New York City, circa 1976, in the show “Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.Credit.Ming Smith and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Jan. 13, 2021
It’s only fairly recently that the mainstream art world, which likes to think of itself as progressive, has fully begun to embrace the idea that Black art matters. Even a few decades ago, if you were an African-American artist, you could realistically expect to find your work excluded from major i.e. white-run museums. For you, the marketing machinery that makes careers didn’t exist. Galleries weren’t showing you. Collectors weren’t buying you. Critics weren’t looking your way.
A selection of over 100 photos by the group are on view in a survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York called Working Together: The Photographers of the Kamoinge Workshop, which runs until 28 March.
“The 1960s and 1970s were a time of social unrest, as ours is at this point,” said Whitney curator Carrie Springer (this traveling exhibition from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is curated by Sarah Eckhardt)
“Looking at how they centered their artwork on depicting the community as they experienced it is inspiring, at a time like now,” said Springer. “Their self-organizing work in their community represents an individual and collective truth, one which is focused on the power art can have in communities.”