Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop
In February of this year, a show, long in the making, of the work of a collective of black photographers in 1960s New York City called the Komoinge Workshop, had just opened with a joyful celebration at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
And then the world changed. We are living with a pandemic. Our city was a center of racial justice protests that roiled our country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others. And now we are on the brink of a national election that will speak to how we see ourselves as a nation.
AND YET . . .
Kehinde Wiley’s statue, Rumors of War, stands on Arthur Ashe Boulevard while most of the monuments to white supremacy that stood on nearby Monument Avenue are gone. Commonwealth, an exhibition examining these very questions of who we are, how we define we the people, and how we can reimagine wealth and come together for the common good opened a few weeks ago at the ICA at VCU. Galleries around town are showing work that speaks to this moment, asks the hard questions, and holds up the mirror, as artists do. And at the VMFA, visitors can see the work of those 1960s black photographers, now through the lens of the events of the past six months.
Dr. Sarah Eckhardt, curator of Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop, joined me via Zoom to talk about the show.
Image above: Beuford Smith (American, born 1941), Two Bass Hit, Lower East Side, 1972, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Arthur and Margaret Glasgow Endowment, 2017.36 © Beuford Smith/Césaire
Image below: Ming Smith (American), America Seen through Stars and Stripes, New York City, New York, ca. 1976, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund, 2016.241 © Ming Smith
“When (Louis Draper) talks about negation, part of what he is talking about is the total lack of African American photographers in museums. . . . There was a lot of outright discrimination they were facing. Their goal was to foster a community where they would, as Ray Francis put it, ‘find what they needed amongst each other’ and they very much did that.”
Paige hosts the LookSEE podcast and is a freelance audio producer, an art lover, and a lifelong Richmonder. Her favorite place to be is in a museum. A close second is a bookstore.
