Bryan Stevenson on the Enduring Power of Gordon Parks
Vanessa Peterson, Frieze
February 2026
The Gordon Parks Foundation is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to preserving and disseminating the work of Parks, as well as providing grants and fellowships to support a new generation of contemporary artists, including Deana Lawson, Tyler Mitchell and Hank Willis Thomas. To celebrate the foundation’s 20th anniversary, civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson will curate a show of Parks’s works at Alison Jacques, London, on view from 5 March. Stevenson is the founder of the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama, which provides representation for prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes and has spearheaded the creation of museums and memorial sites dedicated to the legacies of slavery. Ahead of the show’s opening, Stevenson speaks with senior editor Vanessa Peterson about the responsibilities of cultural institutions in times of political turbulence as well as the continued relevance of Gordon Parks’s photographs. […]