Review: Gordon Parks, National Gallery of Art
Nico Wheadon, The Brooklyn Rail
February 2019
If Wright’s “new tide” embodies the wave of social change that engulfed a segregated 1940 America, Gordon Parks was an essential gravity that washed the revolution ashore. An icon of the Chicago Black Renaissance and postwar Harlem eras, Parks was a self-taught, genre-defying artist whose talent spanned photography, music, writing and film. While he is lesser know as the pioneering director behind the first blaxploitation films of the early 1970s, Parks’s centering of resilient, black protagonists as the heroes of everyday life dates back to his early years as a celebrated documentary photographer. […]