Family Pictures

The Columbus Museum of Art presents Family Pictures, on view February 16 through May 20, 2018. This timely exhibition explores the ways in which Black photographers and artists have portrayed a range of familial relationships, from blood relatives to close-knit neighborhoods to queer communities. 

Beginning with Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes’s groundbreaking 1955 book The Sweet Flypaper of Life, the exhibition gathers photographic series, installations, and videos by an intergenerational group of artists, including John Edmonds, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, Lorraine O’Grady, Gordon Parks, Sondra Perry, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems. Their images of family and community often maneuver between personal stories and broader political realities, between the universal human condition and the particular histories of race in the United States. 

“Family Pictures complements CMA’s outstanding permanent collection holdings, such as our Photo League Collection and our Philip and Suzanne Schiller Collection of American Social Commentary Art 1930–1970,” said CMA Executive Director Nannette V. Maciejunes. “It also presents an opportunity for the Museum to tell a broader, richer, more vivid, and inclusive story of the American experience.”

DeCarava’s photographs were in part a rejoinder to projects like the New York Photo League’s Harlem Document from the late 1930s. “Given that CMA holds the Photo League Collection and many photographs from that series, this exhibition is an opportunity to explore a counterpoint to one of our most well-known and beloved photographic collections,” said Drew Sawyer, the curator of the exhibition. “Like DeCarava, the artists in the exhibition employ various formal strategies and personal narratives to complicate artistic and mainstream representations while also challenging constructions of family and community.” 

The exhibition is organized by Drew Sawyer, Head of Exhibitions and William J. and Sarah Ross Soter Associate Curator of Photography at the Columbus Museum of Art.

Artist’s Talk: Deana Lawson
May 17, 2018, at 6:30pm
Join CMA on Thursday, May 17, 2018, at 6:30pm for a talk by Deana Lawson. This program is free and sponsored by The Contemporaries, an interest group of the Columbus Museum of Art.