A Visual Tribute to Black Resistance with Devin Allen

Presented in collaboration with the Chicago Humanities Festival

November 5, 2022

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Presented as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival's fall 2022 program, Devin Allen—2017 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow who has spent nearly a decade documenting the Black Lives Matter movement—is in conversation with Michal Raz-Russo, Programs Director at the Gordon Parks Foundation. The event focuses on Allen's book, No Justice, No Peace, which honors the connection between past and present racial justice activism.

The Chicago Humanities Festival's Social Justice & Equity Series is generously underwritten by The Allstate Insurance Company.

This program has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this program do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Devin Allen is a self-taught artist, born and raised in West Baltimore. He gained national attention when his photograph of the Baltimore Uprising was published on the cover of Time magazine in May 2015—only the third time the work of an amateur photographer had been featured. Five years later, after the deaths of George Floyd, Tony McDade, and Breonna Taylor, his photograph from a Black Trans Lives Matter protest was published on the cover of Time magazine. He is winner of the 2017 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship. Also in 2017, he was nominated for an NAACP Image Award as a debut author for his book A Beautiful Ghetto. His photographs have been published in New York Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Aperture, and are also in the permanent collections of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, the Reginald F. Lewis Museum in Baltimore, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He is the founder of Through Their Eyes, a youth photography educational program, and recipient of an award from the Maryland Commission on African American History and Culture for dynamic leadership in the arts and activism. He lives in Baltimore.

Michal Raz-Russo is programs director at the Gordon Parks Foundation and editor of Steidl / Gordon Parks Foundation Book Prize publications. She has edited and contributed to LaToya Ruby Frazier: Flint Is Family In Three Acts and has been involved in recent Gordon Parks Foundation publications, including Gordon Parks: Stokely Carmichael and Black Power (with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and Gordon Parks: Segregation Story (expanded edition). Previously she was the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she curated exhibitions such as Subscribe: Artists and Alternative Magazines, 1970–1995; Basma al-Sharif: Capital; Sara Deraedt; Never a Lovely So Real: Photography and Film in Chicago, 1950–1980; Leigh Ledare: The Plot; Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem; Deana Lawson; and The Three Graces.

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