As part of Black History Month, the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York recently held a special retrospective to showcase the images of African-American photographer Louis Draper. The accompanying book, Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge (Schiffer), includes work produced both by Draper and by members of the pioneering Kamoinge Workshop which Draper co-founded in 1963, around the time the Civil Rights Act was passed. Kamoinge, which translates to "a group of people acting together" in Kenya’s Kikuyu language, was the name given to this collective whose aim was to address the under-representation of African-Americans within the art world and to defy the stereotypical ‘headline images’ of black people presented in the media. Of Kamoinge, Draper said: “We nurture and challenge each other in order to attain the highest creative level.”
Kamoinge Workshop artist James M. Mannas Jr. screens his film “King is Dead” (1968), an account of the reactions of his New York community to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The screening is followed by a conversation with the filmmaker
RaMell Ross, moderated by Whitney assistant curator
Carrie Springer.
RaMell Ross is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Rhode Island and Alabama. His feature documentary
Hale County This
Morning, This Evening won a Special Jury Award for Creative Vision at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards.
Presented in collaboration with the Whitney Museum of American Art, this series of programs features conversations with artists from the Kamoinge Workshop included in the exhibition