seeingblackphotography

GESTURES OF REFUSAL: BLACK PHOTOGRAPHY AND VISUAL CULTURE Exhibition Opening at the @cacnola

Presented in partnership with @cacnola, Gestures of Refusal: Black Photography and Visual Culture features 5 immersive installations and over 200 photographs and objects from nearly 100 black photographers from the 1950s to the present. Curated by Shana M. griffin, Gestures of Refusal: Black Photography and Visual Culture is an exercise in the unconventional and the splendid. From the invisible to the obvious, the mundane to the spectacular, the overlooked to the known, the erased, and the remembered, Gestures of Refusal investigates how we experience and render Blackness visible. Gestures of Refusal is the third in a series of exhibitions organized by SEEING BLACK. First Frame, the preludial exhibition of SEEING BLACK: Black Photography in New Orleans 1840 & Beyond, was on view at the New Orleans African American Museum from October 6, 2022, to June 4, 2023. The second exhibition, In the Spirit of Black, was on view at the Ashé Culture Arts Center and Ashé Power House Theater from March 30 to June 4, 2023. The final exhibition of the four-part series will open in the spring of 2024 at Xavier University of Louisiana Art Gallery. Opens January 6 at 6pm. 900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA.

SEEING BLACK is excited to announce a spring exhibition highlighting the photography of 75 Black contemporary photographers whose work documents and celebrates Black life. IN THE SPIRIT OF BLACK, the second in a series of exhibitions presented by SEEING BLACK opens at Ashé Cultural Arts Center on Thursday, March 30at 6 pm and runs until May 27, 2023.   IN THE SPIRIT OF BLACK convenes an intergenerational group of Black photographers whose work engages the photographic grammars, textures, multiplicities, and visual sounds of Black life in and outside of New Orleans.     Offering a rare account of photographs taken by Black photographers from the 1950s to the present, IN THE SPIRIT OF BLACK provides a rich and compelling—yet incomplete—visual spectrum of everyday Blackness, attending to moments of love, loss, abstraction, and concretization within the spectacular, mundane, vernacular, and performative.     SEEING BLACK is a multimedia, research-based project chronicling and celebrating the history, influence, performative aesthetic, and futurity of Black photography in New Orleans. Organized around a publication scheduled for release later this summer by the University of New Orleans Press, SEEING BLACK’s series of exhibitions span multiple sites, a digital platform, and public programming, including the exhibition First Frame, currently on view at the New Orleans African American Museum until June 4, 2023. IN THE SPIRIT OF BLACK is supported by community partners, including the Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Antenna, Amistad Research Center, PUNCTUATE, VIZUAL, University of New Orleans Press, Xavier University Art Gallery, and Xavier University of Louisiana Art Department. SEEING BLACK is funded in part by the UNO Press with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the New Orleans Tourism and Cultural Fund, Jazz and Heritage Foundation, Monroe Fellowship of the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University, Platforms Fund, and the Rosenberg Foundation.   #SeeingBlack #SeeingBlackNewOrleans #SeeingBlackPhotography