This exhibition at Howard University, presented by the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, explores social structures and sites of religious practice documented through Gordon Parks’s photographs from the 1940s to the 1980s. Comprised of over 40 objects—among them works from the Gordon Parks Legacy Collection acquired by Howard University in 2022—the exhibition sheds light on Parks’s underexplored religious and spiritual examinations, which captured the significant role of religion and spirituality in 20th-century modern life. Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life is curated by Dr. Melanee C. Harvey, Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University.
“Gordon Parks’s photography has long been a fixture in the documentation of Black life in America. With contemporary developments in Black religious studies and the history of photography, we saw it necessary to engage with Parks’s insightful perspective on how Black religious and spiritual traditions impact the environment and the communities from which they emerge,” said Curator Dr. Melanee C. Harvey.
“As the largest collection of archival material on the global Black experience, we are proud to utilize our collection to showcase an important facet of Gordon Parks’s practice, and highlight the significance of spirituality and religion to the Black experience through the lens, life, and works of such an extraordinary photographer. We are excited to showcase images from the newly acquired Gordon Parks Legacy Collection for the first time at Howard University and provide the opportunity for students to respond to and engage with Gordon Parks’s legacy,” said Dr. Benjamin Talton, Director of the MSRC and Professor of History at Howard University.
MSRC, Howard University’s research facility and repository of archival materials on the global Black experience, holds archives of major figures in politics, arts, and activism. It also holds the Gordon Parks Legacy Collection, a collection of 244 photographs acquired from the Gordon Parks Foundation in 2022. Spanning Parks’s career of five decades, the Gordon Parks Legacy Collection is one of the most comprehensive resources for the study of Parks’s life and works anywhere in the world. Collaboration between the Gordon Parks Foundation and Howard University goes beyond the acquisition, with two of the University’s associate professors, Dr. Melanee C. Harvey and Larry W. Cook, receiving fellowships from the Foundation—the 2023 Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing and 2024 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship in Art, respectively.
Temples of Hope introduces Gordon Parks’s religious and spiritual development as an important context for that informed his photographic approach. The exhibition traces the geographic locations Parks visited and photographed, displaying the centrality of faith-based communities in Black social life.
Accompanying the exhibition is the publication Gordon Parks, Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago, 1953, which expands on the themes in the exhibition, and explores the role of Christian spaces and religious practices as interventions in the industrial urban landscape of Near West Side, Chicago. Gordon Parks: Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago, 1953, published by the Gordon Parks Foundation, Howard University, and Steidl, features Parks’s photographs from this unpublished Life Magazine project, alongside scholarly essays. This volume includes the first biographical treatment on the central subject of this body of photography, Rev. Ernest F. Ledbetter, a leading Baptist clergyman and local civil rights champion. This book also features reflections from the Ledbetter family on the visual life of the minister. This publication also includes a new poem composed by Howard University master instructor, author and multidisciplinary artist, Darlene R. Taylor. This book concludes with two brief essays that explore the rich photographic history preserved in the collections of Moorland Spingarn Research Center at Howard University and Gordon Parks’s first experience with Howard University in 1942.
https://msrc.howard.edu/
