"PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT, 1955-1985"

Black photographers have long served as some of the nation’s most incisive documentarians - witnesses with cameras, capturing the beauty, complexity, and contradictions of Black life in ways the mainstream press seldom could. Their work wasn’t simply artistic; it was investigative, journalistic, historical. It preserved truths that were often ignored or actively distorted by dominant media. Their work stretches far beyond any single movement - yet their influence is essential to understanding the Black Arts Movement (BAM) - a pivotal era comparable to the Harlem Renaissance. It’s this relationship that the National Gallery of Art (NGA) examines in Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985. 

Now on view through January 11, 2026, it's the first-of-its-kind to investigate photography's role in the BAM. Arranged thematically, the show forms a sweeping visual documentary of political struggle and community building intertwined with  beauty, fashion, and cultural rebirth.  The history uncovered reveals Black photographers not only developed and cultivated a distinctly Black visual culture, they built one of the most influential - and least credited - archives of American life.

The show assembles nearly 150 works, across media, by more than 100 artists including Gordon Parks, Romare Bearden, Louis Draper, Betty Saar, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, and Kwame Brathwaite. The selection showcases the broad cultural exchange between creatives who - during the Civil Rights and Black Power era of the ’60s and ’70s - collectively sought use their gifts to dismantle stereotypes and build a new, self-defined Black aesthetic and identity. This cultural and artistic uprising came to be known as the Black Arts Movement - a fusion of politics and art, purposely designed to give Black Americans a potent, distinctive voice - rooted in pride, sharpened by resistance, and influential - to this day - across literature, theater, art, and music. The show also features works from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain, giving voice to the expansive global engagement with the BAM.

Part of what makes this history so powerful is that Black photographers – much like the BAM - did not need institutional permission. At a time when civil rights legislation and art museum shows required the approval of white lawmakers and curators, photography operated independently of gatekeepers. With a camera, a darkroom, and access to their own communities, Black photographers built an alternative image economy capturing everything from grassroots political organizing, to celebrities, music, and the rise of the Black middle class. They found platforms in Black newspapers and magazines like Ebony and Jet, gained national influence and created a record of Black life that was candid, expansive, and self-defined.

The exhibition reveals the influence of this work went far beyond the Black press. This visual vocabulary began shaping mass advertising and broader cultural representation. By the late 1970s, companies such as Kraft Foods were hiring Black photographers like Barbara DuMetz to reach Black consumers with greater nuance and respect. Their images helped recalibrate how brands spoke to Black audiences and how Black people saw themselves reflected in commercials. Archives that once lived in filing cabinets - such as Charles “Teenie” Harris’s 80,000-image collection, is now housed at the Carnegie Museum; the Ebony/Jet archive was acquired for preservation and public access...to the tune of $30 million; both are evidence of how deeply these photographers impacted the public narrative and record, and thus, American history.

At the center of this conversation stands Dr. Deborah Willis, the exhibition’s co-curator and one of the most visionary scholars of Black visual culture. As chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and founding director of the Center for Black Visual Culture, Willis has spent decades excavating and interpreting histories. Her landmark book, "Reflections in  Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present" (2000) was the first comprehensive history of Black photographers. Her 2009 release "Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present" featured more than 100 photographers and over 200 photos to challenge the general market assumptions about what it means to be "beautiful." That research opened the door for exhibitions like this one. The themes developed more than a decade ago in Posing Beauty in African American Culture - the exhibition based on the book - echo throughout Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985, offering a powerful throughline between past and present.

“We’re not only looking at the horrific experiences and the difficult times,” she said during the tour. “There’s a calm moment of a couple finding repose and joy in family.”    

The show features never-before-seen photos as well as famous photos, like ‘I AM A MAN,' by Ernest C. Withers. “My son  grew up with that image in our house - and he asked, ‘What does that mean?’ We know that that’s a man,” Willis said. “We had to do the history…what it meant to be human and to work in difficult situations where two workers were killed in a garbage truck because of unsafe working conditions; and so we see that kind of activism, from labor, to politics, to voting rights, to Vietnam.” 

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 expands the conversation beyond the camera, showing how photography became raw material for generations of mixed-media artists. 

Romare Bearden’s 110th Street Harlem Blues, (1972) a celebration of his beloved New York home, hangs in the first gallery, opening the show. Works like this, along with David C. Driskell, Ralph Arnold, and others, reveal how artists spliced photographs into collage and built dynamic new worlds from the fragments of the old. Their practice reverberates through contemporary artists like Lorna Simpson, who produced an entire series reimagining Jet magazine's ‘Beauty of the Week’ with dignity and poetry. Simpson’s work was featured, along with 48 other artists, in Multiplicity: Blackness in American Collage. The show revealed numerous contemporary artists were in deep, deliberate conversation with the visual legacies shaped by Black photographers and Black-owned media. 

Co-curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of the department of photographs at NGA, and Dr. Deborah Willis, the exhibition will embark on a national journey – traveling to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in February, then on to the Mississippi Museum of Art in July. As it moves across the country, it carries with it an undeniable argument: the Black Arts Movement was propelled forward by image-makers who seized a moment. Their influence still shapes how America - and the world - sees.