he paths of Gordon Parks and James Baldwin regularly crisscrossed over the course of their lives. Both were creative polymaths, each a self-invention who overcame impoverished childhoods to propel themselves to the heights of artistic and activist achievement in the 20th century. Parks became not only a documentary photographer but also an author, composer, and film director. Writer, activist, and public intellectual, Baldwin penned path-breaking essays, plays, novels, memoirs, and journalism that explored race, sexual identity, and the American psyche.
Despite differing artistic sensibilities and spheres of influence, Parks and Baldwin shared the same, staunch commitments to the civil rights struggle, using art in service of social justice, and deploying their gifts to reflect the Black American experience in all its diversity.
This summer has brought the two into conversation again through the exhibits, Gordon Parks: Camera Portraits from the Corcoran Collection at the National Gallery and This Morning, This Evening, So Soon: James Baldwin and the Voices of Queer Resistance at the National Portrait Gallery. Each celebrates these creators who continue to shape art and dialogues about identity, inequality, and community. Taken together, the two curatorially divergent exhibitions offer compelling, though bounded, perspectives on these artists’ incomparable talent and influence.
