Gordon Parks Photographs Head to Howard University
Louis Jebb and Chinma Johnson-Nwosu, The Art Newspaper
June 2022
More than 250 photographs by Gordon Parks are set to be acquired by Howard University, Washington DC, one of the leading historically Black colleges and universities in the US.
The collection takes in five decades of Parks’s storied career, and includes Parks’s early portraits of Robert Todd Duncan, a leading figure of Black American opera, and Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago. The collection also contains Parks’s mid-career portraits of the actor Sidney Poitier and images of later film and fashion icons such as the film director Spike Lee and the Somali model Iman.
‘Gordon Parks’s work helped define American art in the 20th century’, says Jelani Cobb, dean of the Columbia Journalism School and board member of the Gordon Parks Foundation. ‘There is no better place to help safeguard his legacy than the mecca of Black education.’