Left: Larry W. Cook; Right: Nelson George
6:00pm
The Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery
48 Wheeler Avenue
Pleasantville, New York, 10570
Held in conjunction with the opening of Larry Cook: Forever, For Always at The Gordon Parks Foundation Gallery.
Larry W. Cook is a 2024 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellow in Art.
Nelson George is an author and filmmaker, and a contributor to Jamel Shabazz: Albums
Click here to reigster
Larry W. Cook is an interdisciplinary artist and archivist working across photography, video, and mixed media. Cook received his MFA from George Washington University. From 2007 to 2013, he worked as a club photographer throughout the Washington D.C. area, setting up makeshift photo booths that featured backdrops of surrealist landscapes and luxury goods. Cook’s practice explores how the pose and hand-painted backdrops circulate within vernacular club and prison photographs, often re-imagining them through collage, digital manipulation, and staged photography. Cook’s work celebrates the legacy of the pose as a form of individual agency and pays homage to the rich tradition of Black cultural spaces. Cook has exhibited his work nationally at the Brooklyn Museum, Baltimore Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, National Portrait Gallery, and internationally at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt in Germany and Efie Gallery in Dubai. His work is in the public collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Harvard Art Museums, Baltimore Museum of Art, Light Work, and other institutions. Cook is a recipient of the 2024 Gordon Parks Fellowship. He is an Associate Professor at Howard University.
Nelson George is an established author and filmmaker with a passion for telling stories of the black experience in America. George is the author of several ground breaking histories of African American music, including Where Did Our Love Go: the Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, Hip Hop America and The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train. He has published three collections of music journalism, Buppies, BBoys, Baps & Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul America and the The Nelson George Mixtape Volume 1 and 2, which are available through Pacific Books. www.pacificpacific.pub. As a novelist he has written several popular novels with music themes, including five in the D Hunter music noir series (The Accidental Hunter, The Plot Against Hip Hop, The Lost Treasures of R&B, To Funk and Die in LA and The Darkest Hearts) all published by Akashic Books. In television, George was a producer on the Emmy Award winning The Chris Rock Show (HBO), a producer on Hip Hop Honors (VH1), executive producer of the high rated American Gangster crime series (BET), a writer on A Grammy Salute to The Sounds of Change (CBS) in 2021 and an executive producer on documentary series about Tupac Shakur, Dear Mama (FX) directed by Allen Hughes. As a filmmaker George has co-written the screenplays to Strictly Business and CB4, and directed and co-wrote the HBO film Life Support for which Queen Latifah won a Golden Globe. He directed the Lifetime film The Real MVP and was a writer/producer on Netflix’s The Get Down series. He has directed a number of documentaries including Finding the Funk (VH1), The Announcement (ESPN), Brooklyn Boheme (Showtime), Say Hey, Willie Mays! (HBO MAX) and Thriller 40 (Showtime/Paramount+). His feature length doc on ballerina Misty Copeland, A Ballerina's Tale, was released theatrically by IFC. Currently he is raising funds for a documentary called a Great Day in Hip Hop Revisited, parts of which have been screened at various museums since 2023. He’s also writing a book, Brooklyn Boheme, for Henry Holt books. Nelson works through his production company, Urban Romances. He post regularly on his The Nelson George Mixtape Substack and his YouTube channel.
