Philip Brookman of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. on “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work, 1940 - 50”
Saturday, September 11, 2021
10:00 - 11:30 AM PDT
Gordon Parks, Self-Portrait, 1941; Gelatin Silver Print; Private Collection, copyright and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation.
Join us on Saturday, September 11th for a virtual visit with Philip Brookman, Consulting Curator, Department of Photographs, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Brookman will discuss the life and legacy of photographer Gordon Parks, and speak about the exhibition “Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work, 1940-50” presented at the museum November 2018 - January 2019. This event will also focus on Parks’ role as an educator, his belief in the camera as a tool for change, and a discussion on the role of media literacy in education today with Assistant Professor in Art & Art History at Stanford University Jonathan Calm.
This event has limited attendance. To secure your spot, please complete the registration form to your left.
ABOUT PHILIP BROOKMAN
Philip Brookman is consulting curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. There he has organized Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 and Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He also edited the recent book Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 with the National Gallery of Art, The Gordon Parks Foundation, and Steidl. He was a museum fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles from January through March 2020 and is currently working on exhibitions about Dorothea Lange’s portraits and the relationship between photography and the Black Arts Movement.
Brookman was chief curator and head of research, senior curator of photography and media arts, as well as curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art between 1993 and 2014. He organized or co-organized many projects there, including exhibitions on Eadweard Muybridge, Hank Willis Thomas, Taryn Simon, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Jim Goldberg, Gilles Peress, Larry Sultan, and Danny Lyon. He oversaw development of the Corcoran’s photography and new media collections, curated numerous exhibitions from the collections, and curated the Corcoran Biennial exhibition in 2000. Brookman also organized and co-organized exhibitions for Tate Modern and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and held curatorial positions at Washington Project for the Arts, Centro Cultural de la Raza, San Diego, and the University of California, Santa Cruz between 1977 and 1992. He is also a photographer, filmmaker, and writer, working primarily on issues of modern and contemporary art and photography. In 2015 Steidl published his book Redlands, a work of fiction with photographs.
ABOUT JONATHAN CALM
Jonathan Calm is a visual artist in the media of photography and video, represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, and assistant professor at Stanford University.
His earlier work focuses on the relationship between technologies of representation and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities. His exploration of the socio-cultural, historical and geopolitical imprint of public housing on both sides of the Atlantic puts into perspective, questions and implodes the white utopian legacy of European Modernism to reveal hidden narratives and forgotten residents.
More recently, Calm has pointed his critical eye toward American car culture, exposing how the mythical promise of a boundless journey across the land masks a more sinister reality of African American automobility. His new work draws inspiration from The Negro Motorist Green Book, a travel guide published during the last three decades of the Jim Crow era to direct travelers of color to safe and dignified accommodations. Through a varied array of media - including installation, reenactment and portraiture - he creates complex representations of the black American experience on the road as a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.
Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions and his work has been reviewed in numerous publications, among which The New York Times, Art in America, The New Yorker, Artforum, The Washington Post andThe Wall Street Journal.
Calm was the 2019 recipient of the prestigious Headlands Center for the Arts Larry Sultan Photography Award in partnership with McEvoy Foundation for the Arts and Pier 24 Photography. The KQED Arts profile Jonathan Calm Revisits ‘Green Book’ Locations in Search of America’s Past and Present was nominated for a 2020 Northern California Area Emmy Award for Best Historic/Cultural-Feature/Segment.
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