Family Pictures
Columbus Museum of Art (traveled to Milwaukee Art Museum)

e-flux announcement 
Dazed and Confused
Aperture
PBS
ARTnews
The Columbus Dispatch

On view February 16 through May 20, 2018, Family Pictures 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 life often maneuver between intimate, everyday stories and broader political realities, between the universal human condition and the particular histories of race in the United States.

A touchstone for several of the artists in the exhibition is the work of Roy DeCarava (American, 1919-2009). Coming of age in Harlem during the 1940s, DeCarava reacted against what he saw as superficial stereotypes and “sociological” studies of his neighborhood by mostly white outsiders. With the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, the artist set out to create expressive photographs of life in his community. He eventually published 140 pictures along with text by Langston Hughes in The Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955), a fictional family album that tenderly captures intimate moments of domestic life both in Harlem and seemingly everywhere.

“DeCarava’s photographs were in part a rejoinder to projects like the 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 of one of our most well-known and beloved photographic collections,” said Sawyer. “Like DeCarava, the artists in the exhibition employ various formal strategies and personal narratives to complicate artistic and mainstream representations while also challenging various constructions of family and community.”