The National Gallery of Art celebrates one of the greatest African-American aesthetic revolutions with a groundbreaking exhibition on photography and the Black Arts Movement.

Beneath the surface of the images, history emerges. From September 21, 2025 to January 11, 2026, the National Gallery of Art in Washington will present the first-ever major exhibition dedicated to the crucial role of photography in the African-American artistic and political movement known as the Black Arts Movement.

Between 1955 and 1985, photography became much more than a documentary tool: it embodied an act of reappropriation, a visual manifesto, and a strategy for cultural self-determination. This free exhibition, open to all, will bring together 150 major works, revealing the depth and diversity of a generation of artists who, through their lenses, shaped a new image of Black American identity.

Born from the social and political upheavals of the 1960s, the Black Arts Movement is inextricably linked to the struggle for civil rights and cultural emancipation. This deliberately diverse movement blends poetry, music, theater, visual arts, and, of course, photography. It gave rise to a radical aesthetic, forged in urgency, self-affirmation, Black beauty, memory, and dignity.

The exhibition powerfully captures this collective pulse. Through photographs by major figures such as Roy DeCarava, Kwame Brathwaite, Doris Derby, Emory Douglas, Barbara McCullough, and Ming Smith, a whole universe of visual narratives emerges. Street portraits, community scenes, mobilization posters, activist stagings, and artistic experiments: each image becomes a declaration.

How do we represent what has long been rendered invisible? This question connects the exhibited works like a common thread. Romare Bearden, Betye Saar, Billy Abernathy, and Barkley Hendricks reinvent an iconography of Black pride. Challenging dominant stereotypes, these artists write an alternative history of America, in which Black subjects are no longer objects of observation, but authors of their own narrative.

Photography here becomes a living archive, an embodied memory. The moving portrait of Ethel Shariff, in a nun's habit at the head of a swarm of Black women forming an almost sacred V, embodies this tension between silent power and collective strength. An entire people stands behind her.

Conceived by Philip Brookman (associate curator of the photography department at the National Gallery of Art) and the brilliant Deborah Willis (professor at New York University, director of the Center for Black Visual Culture), the exhibition is as demanding as it is accessible. It takes place in the museum's West Building, with a restrained installation that highlights the prints in all their materiality.

A program of lectures, including an opening meeting on September 21, accompanies the exhibition. It is not just about looking at these images, but about listening to them, engaging in dialogue with them, and understanding what they still say today.

After Washington, the exhibition will travel to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, then to the Mississippi Museum of Art. This tour confirms the importance of the project, designed to permanently establish the Black Arts Movement within the American and global museum narrative.

Supported by committed institutions such as the Trellis Fund, the Shared Earth Foundation, and The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, this initiative is accompanied by a richly illustrated publication, supported by Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman.

“Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985” is not an exhibition about the past. It speaks of today, of how images can still heal, build, and connect. It holds up a mirror to us, but also builds a bridge. Because to look is already to begin to understand. And to understand is perhaps to begin to change.

“Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985”
National Gallery of Art
6th Street and Constitution Avenue, Washington
From September 21, 2025 to January 11, 2026

nga.gov/exhibitions/photography-and-black-arts-movement-1955-1985