How can a single artist reproach centuries of ingrained injustice? How can they simultaneously offer hope for an equitable future? South African “visual activist” Zanele Muholi has mounted a stunning, often agonizing, deeply layered, and altogether dazzling artistic plea for a fair and inclusive society....... Read more about What makes it great?: Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness
"The photography of Zanele Muholi stopped me in my tracks years back as I made my way through the MFA. This new exhibit of their work at the Cooper Gallery, curated by Renée Mussai, is a must see. Muholi is both the photographer and the subject. Beyond the drama of the color contrast in their portraiture, Muholi fashions everyday items into objects that reckon with current and past systems of violence and disenfranchisement."
Frank Stewart learned young how to fail often with his camera.
A painter could spend days on a canvas only to realize the result was a “monstrosity,” the acclaimed photographer and artist said during a conversation with New York University Professor of Performance Studies Fred Moten ’84 at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research’s Hiphop Archive last week.
Music power couple Alicia Keys and Kasseem Dean, known as Swizz Beatz, bought paintings by emerging artist Tschabalala Self, whose prices have risen along with her critical acclaim.
After seeing the Gordon Parks exhibit now showing at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, it was clear that the work has a lot to offer to children who may not be aware of this time period in history.
The music industry titans, who married in 2010, are proud art collectors and own the largest private collection of work by Parks, the renowned photographer who captured African-American life in the 20th century.
“WHAT HAS MORALITY WON US?” This provocative question, posed by Bryan Stevenson, a lawyer, activist, and professor at New York University School of Law, lingered in the room on the second day of the “Vision and Justice” conference at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and his wife Alicia Keys don’t exactly remember the first time they came across the work of photographer Gordon Parks. That’s completely understandable because the photographer’s images—which span from fashion to portraits of life during the Civil Rights Movement—were intertwined within the pages of magazines like Life, for which he took countless pictures, including the 1950 cover of baseball player Jackie Robinson and wrote and shot a feature for the 1968 story “The Negro and the Cities”; or Vogue, for which he shot swan-like models in the latest couture from... Read more about Forbes: 'Swizz Beatz And Alicia Keys Want You To Go To Harvard To Learn About Gordon Parks'
Alicia Keys and husband Swizz Beatz are sharing a selection of gems from their artistic treasure right over the river in Cambridge, having just come to town to help open the exhibit, Gordon Parks: Selections From The Dean Collection, at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art within Harvard’s Hutchins Center.
A moment can mean many things to many people. It could refer to a certain perceived set of extant subject matter, living or inanimate, interacting in real time and possibly worthy of the well-timed snap of a camera shutter.
What does a Bronx-born hip hop producer and art collector have in common with one of the most iconic photojournalists of all time? Kasseem ‘Swizz Beatz’ Dean and Gordon Parks have both been gatekeepers of African-American narratives. Dean and his wife Alicia Keys, own the largest private holdings of Gordon Parks’s photography. A new exhibition, Gordon Parks: Selections from the Dean Collection, is on display at Harvard University’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery into July 2019.
The water-slicked hand clawing up from beneath the waves feels urgent, panicked. Not very Gordon Parks, but I think that’s the point. The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art at Harvard University is hosting a key sampling of the famed African-American photojournalist’s work from the collection of Kasseem Dean and Alicia Keys — dozens of pictures shot for Life and Vogue magazines, ranging from Harlem gangs and Malcolm X to fashion to celebrity portraits. But this is the one that gets me.
In a time when talk of losing — losing lives, losing political battles, losing rights — can overwhelm the national conversation, “Nine Moments for Now,” an exhibition at Harvard’s Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center, explores the question: “What does winning look like?”
Near the start of “Nine Moments for Now,” the riveting exhibition at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center in Cambridge through Jan. 21, is a hall of black and white photos of the dead.
