Gordon Parks: Homeward to the Prairie I Come
The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas
7 September 2021 – 28 May 2022
‘Gordon Parks: Homeward to the Prairie I Come’, 2021, exhibition view, The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas. Courtesy: © The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas
‘Gordon Parks: Homeward to the Prairie I Come’, 2021, exhibition view, The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas. Courtesy: © The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas
‘Gordon Parks: Homeward to the Prairie I Come’, 2021, exhibition view, The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas. Courtesy: © The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas
‘Gordon Parks: Homeward to the Prairie I Come’, 2021, exhibition view, The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas. Courtesy: © The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas
Gordon Parks is the subject of a solo exhibition, ‘Homeward to the Prairie I Come’, at The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kansas, from 7 September 2021 – 28 May 2022.
Taking its title from a poem that Parks wrote for the Manhattan Mercury newspaper in 1984, the exhibition draws upon works generously donated by Gordon Parks and the Gordon Parks Foundation to Kansas State University in 1973 and explores the ways in which Parks sought to project himself to his fellow Kansans through the images he chose for the university.
‘Homeward to the Prairie I Come’ is part of the K-State Gordon Parks Project initiated by the Beach Museum of Art and K-State Department of English. To coincide with the exhibition, the University English department has launched a website, The Learning Tree: A Gordon Parks Digital Archive, which provides access to archival materials and oral histories about the filming of The Learning Tree (1969).