When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
“Picturing the Self”: Black Photography Illuminates at the National Gallery of Art
Posted on October 21, 2025 in Blog Posts
Authors:
Ashleigh Coren
On October 4th, the last day before the museum was set to close due to the 2025 government shutdown, I rushed to the National Gallery of Art to see Photography and the Black Arts Movement: 1955–1985. This vast, stirring, and overwhelming exhibition is essentially a history lesson on the Black Arts Movement and its intersections with other disciplines like photojournalism and advertising. Most importantly, it situates Black art and artists as futuristic and major influences on American art, particularly within the post–Civil Rights era.
Attending the show on a day when the museum was about to close—after a whirlwind year of practices affecting museums, representation, staffing, and diversity and inclusion initiatives—was an out-of-body experience. The idea that an exhibition like this would be closing for an indeterminate period, inaccessible to the public and to people who need content like this most, felt heavy. This is a moment that demonstrates the power and connectedness that art brings to the United States and to people around the world. Walking through the show, it cast a shadow to think about how much time and effort were put into it and the reality that, depending on how things go, many people won’t even get a chance to see it.
The National Gallery of Art describes this as the first exhibition of its kind in terms of subject matter. It purports to be the “first presentation to investigate photography’s role in the Black Arts Movement,” which would later pave the way for how we view the connections between socially engaged art and representation in 2025. The show is comprehensive, featuring 150 works across several mediums—I saw painting, video, collage, installation, and, of course, photography. The wall text is fantastic, providing a comprehensive overview of each gallery space. Sections include themes like “Picturing the Self,” “Picturing the Movement,” “Activism,” “History on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and its effects on the Black Arts Movement,” “Fashioning the Self,” “Ritual,” and my favorite wall text: a section called “About Looking.” The educator in me loves this meta-commentary about how photography is both truth and performance at the same time—a portal that is also shaped, posed, and reflective.
I saw glamour photographs from Raphael Albert, a British photographer, as well as work by Ming Smith, Nellie Mae Rowe, Barkley L. Hendricks, and so many other amazing artists who saw themselves, their community, and their work as intertwined. When you walk into the exhibition, no matter where you turn, you’re surrounded by art objects and supplemental text that help ground you in each gallery space. This show is not just about America—it’s about the art of the African diaspora. You can see how things like music and evolving standards of beauty transcend international boundaries.
My only disappointment was an installation by Adrian Piper: a mini-room of sorts built in the middle of the gallery space called “Art for the Art World from 1976.” Inside this small space with a door, you walk in to find custom wallpaper covering all the walls, documenting horrendous events. As you stand in the room, a voiceover by Piper comes out of the speakers. One thing she says—”I really just don’t want to have to deal with the horrors of the world when I’m looking at art”—felt like a splash of cold water in my face, given the political moment we’re in right now and the censorship and silencing of certain narratives. I was disappointed because I could barely hear the audio in that space, and I wish there had been an opportunity to see or at least read what Piper was saying. I don’t know if this was intentional or not—maybe it was. Maybe the idea is that these are the things we hear every day but don’t listen to anymore; after a while, they just become background noise.
What always matters most to me are the historical, cultural, and personal connections that can be brought to life through exhibitions, and Photography and the Black Arts Movement does so exceptionally well. It’s so easy to imagine individuals like Lorna Simpson, Roy DeCarava, and all these amazing people working concurrently or in their own spaces, building, crafting, and thinking about new and exciting ways to make art in their communities and beyond. Peeling back this curtain is crucial at this time because it reminds us that these artists were people—people who were held up and supported by local newspapers and magazines that they both created and were part of. Much of their work was carried out in spaces they had to create on their own with very little capital. The things we think of today as avant-garde resulted from the exclusion and dismissal of Black brilliance.
At the end of my visit, I had the pleasure of meeting two extraordinary individuals from Memorialize the Monument, a Minnesota-based organization creating a living archive, dedicated to collecting, preserving, and activating the plywood protest murals created during the 2020 Minneapolis Uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Their work is a reminder that even as institutions like the National Gallery of Art face closure, grassroots organizations continue preserving and activating community art. It makes me think of Roy Lewis’s photograph in the exhibition of Chicago’s Wall of Respect mural—a now-vanished landmark that documented Black pride and resistance in the 1960s. From then to now, the work continues.
About the author:
Ashleigh Coren is a content strategist, educator, and curator based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Sign up for Toward Inclusive Excellence (TIE) new post notifications and updates.
Interested in contributing to TIE? Send an email to Fatima at Choice (fmohie-eldin@ala.org) with your topic idea.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.