Mississippi Museum of Art Presents Groundbreaking Exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985

 Last cease on a nationwide tour, the exhibition is on view July 25–November 8, 2026

Jackson, MS…Mississippi Museum of Art (MMA/the Museum) presents Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, a landmark exhibition exploring the work of American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora photographers and artists working with pictures in growing and fostering a distinctly Black visible tradition and id. Investigating the medium’s function within the Black Arts Movement, which advanced concurrently with the American civil rights and worldwide freedom actions, the exhibition reveals how artists developed methods to have interaction communities and encourage self-representation through the turbulent many years of the mid-Twentieth century.

Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, the place the exhibition debuted, it’s on view at MMA from July 25 to November 8, 2026. Prior to MMA, Photography and the Black Arts Movement was introduced on the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

The exhibition includes roughly 150 works, spanning pictures, video, collage, portray, set up, and different lens-based media, a few of which have hardly ever or by no means been on public view. Among the over 100 artists included within the exhibition are Billy Abernathy (Fundi), Romare Bearden, Dawoud Bey, Frank Bowling, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Louis Draper, David C. Driskell, Charles Gaines, James E. Hinton, Danny Lyon, Gordon Parks, Adrian Piper, Nellie Mae Rowe, Betye Saar, Raymond Saunders, Jamel Shabazz, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems.

Photography and the Black Arts Movement is drawn principally from the National Gallery’s assortment—together with greater than 50 newly acquired works by Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Louis Draper, Ray Francis, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Horace Ové, Jamel Shabazz, Malik Sidibé, Ming Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems, amongst others—and from lenders within the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada.

This expansive number of work showcases the broad cultural alternate between writers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and different visible artists of many backgrounds, who got here collectively within the mid-Twentieth century to grapple with social and political modifications, the pursuit of civil rights, and the emergence of the Pan-African motion by artwork. The exhibition additionally contains artwork from Africa, the Caribbean, and Great Britain to contextualize world engagement with the Black Arts Movement.

Images function outstanding civil rights leaders, artists, and musicians in addition to on a regular basis individuals, bringing collectively studio, press, and road pictures with pictures that had been initially created and circulated in style, industrial, political, and journalistic contexts. Structured round thematic sections—together with explorations of neighborhood, style and sweetness, the media, and ritual—the exhibition evokes a holistic imaginative and prescient of the interval, its far-reaching cultural impression, and the breadth and texture of Black id.

Photographs had been a vital software used to speak the occasions of the civil rights motion to a nationwide and worldwide viewers. Artists and information media understood the facility of pictures to handle inequality and advocate for civil and human rights. Some works within the exhibition are by photojournalists who captured the speeches, marches, and sit-ins that indelibly recorded and helped outline the period.

The Black Arts Movement was additionally instrumental in reshaping style, promoting, and media as instruments of self-representation and cultural empowerment, prompting advertisers to have interaction Black audiences extra thoughtfully by hiring Black photographers and fashions of their campaigns.

MMA’s presentation is distinguished by a partnership with Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center, which operates the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) Learning Center. COFO was the epicenter of the fashionable civil rights motion in Mississippi and served because the organizational residence for Freedom Riders in 1964. It was notably one of many solely initiatives to efficiently unify a coalition of activist organizations within the combat for civil rights that included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and a number of native organizations.

To spotlight COFO’s pivotal contributions to the historical past of civil rights, MMA will produce supplementary wall labels within the exhibition’s part on activism and supply expanded sources on its Bloomberg Connects app. In addition, MMA’s presentation will embody hardly ever seen pictures taken at Jackson State University (previously Jackson State College) in 1973, through the inaugural Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, organized by poet Margeret Walker. The pictures seize main Black ladies writers of the Black Arts Movement, together with Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni, who gathered on the pageant for readings, conversations, and cultural alternate.

MMA Associate Curator of Exhibitions Kaegan Sparks stated, “Our goal of partnering with COFO and the Margaret Walker Center for this powerful presentation is to amplify the singular role that Mississippi played in galvanizing both the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements. Photographers from Mississippi include Doris Derby and Roy Lewis. Documentation by Bob Fletcher, Doug Harris, Danny Lyon, and Tamio Wakayama vividly portray the aftermath of Freedom Summer and the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964—two civil rights milestones organized by COFO.”

Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. It is curated by Philip Brookman, consulting curator of pictures on the National Gallery of Art, and Deborah Willis, college professor and chair of the division of pictures and imaging on the Tisch School of the Arts and director of the Center for Black Visual Culture at New York University. The exhibition has been overseen at MMA by Kaegan Sparks, affiliate curator of exhibitions and Chase Quinn, artistic director and curator of particular tasks.

Exhibition Publication
Published by the National Gallery of Art in affiliation with Yale University Press, the totally illustrated catalogue accompanying the exhibition examines the very important function pictures performed within the evolution of the Black Arts Movement, which introduced collectively writers, filmmakers, and artists as they explored methods of utilizing artwork to advance civil rights and Black self-determination. Edited by Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis, with a preface by Angela Y. Davis and contributions by Makeda Best, Margo Natalie Crawford, Romi Crawford, Cheryl Finley, Sarah Lewis, and Audrey Sands, the publication reveals how pictures operated throughout artwork, neighborhood constructing, journalism, and political messaging to contribute to the event of a distinctly Black artwork and tradition. Essays by these distinguished students concentrate on subjects comparable to ladies and the motion, neighborhood, activism, and Black photojournalism, and contemplate the advanced connections between American artists and the African diaspora, and the dynamic interchange of Pan-African concepts that propelled the motion.

Exhibition Support
Support for the MMA exhibition is supplied by Teiger Foundation, Visit Jackson, Southern Poverty Law Center, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings, LLP, and Clarion Ledger.

Press pictures and captions are at this link.

About the Mississippi Museum of Art
Established in 1911, the Mississippi Museum of Art is devoted to connecting Mississippi to the world and the facility of artwork to the facility of neighborhood. The Museum’s everlasting assortment contains work, pictures, multimedia works, and sculpture by Mississippi, American, and worldwide artists. The largest artwork museum within the state, the Mississippi Museum of Art presents a vibrant roster of exhibitions, public applications, creative and neighborhood partnerships, academic initiatives, and alternatives for alternate year-round. Programming is developed with neighborhood involvement to make sure that a multiplicity of voices and views are represented. Signature applications embody the Center for Art and Public Exchange, a community-driven effort to make sure native relevance to choices; the Annie Laurie Swaim Hearin Memorial Exhibition, a bi-annual nationally acknowledged touring exhibition program; and the Mississippi Invitational and Jane Hiatt Fellowship, selling the careers of working artists within the state. Located at 380 South Lamar Street in downtown Jackson, the Mississippi Museum of Art and its applications are sponsored partly by the City of Jackson and Visit Jackson. Support can also be supplied partly by funding from the Mississippi Arts Commission, a state company, and partly by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal company. For extra data, go to www.msmuseumart.org.

***

Visitor Information
Opening Hours
Tuesday – Saturday: 11 AM – 5 PM
Sunday: 1 – 5 PM

Admission Prices
$15 Adults
$13 Seniors (65+)
$10 Youth (ages 6-17) and College Students (with ID)**
Free admission is at present provided to the next teams:

• MMA Members
• Children ages 5 and beneath
• The public the primary Saturday of each month for Access for All: Free First
• Saturdays. Generous assist is supplied by the Art Bridges Foundation’s
• Access for All.
• **Ok-12 college students on Tuesdays due to Trustmark and Thursdays due to Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Mississippi.
• **Mississippi State University and Millsaps College college students, due to our Collegiate Partner Program.
• Active-duty navy personnel and as much as 5 members of the family from May 16 to September 7, 2026, as a participant of Blue Star Museums.

Address
380 South Lamar Street, Jackson, MS 39201

Image Captions

Harry Adams, Protest Car, Los Angeles, 1962. Inkjet print, 11 x 13 15/16 inches (27.5 x 35.4 cm). Courtesy of Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, California State University, Northridge, Harry Adams Archive

Horace Ové, Walking Proud, Notting Hill Carnival, c. 1972 (printed 2023). Inkjet print, 34 x 24 in (86.4 x 61 cm). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2025.43.3 © Sir Horace Ové

Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Portrait of Manasie Ree Horn with Reels as Necklace), c. 1970 (printed later). Inkjet print, 29 ½ x 29 ½ in (74.9 x 74.9 cm). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Gift of Funds from Renée Harbers Liddell and Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2024.70.1. © Kwame Brathwaite

Doris A. Derby, Member of Southern Media photographing a younger lady, Farish Street, Jackson, Mississippi, 1968. Gelatin silver print, 12 7/8 x 8 5/8 inches (32.7 x 21.9 cm). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Gift of David Knaus, 2022.149.2. © Doris A. Derby

Barkley L. Hendricks, Self-Portrait with Red Sweater, 1980 (printed 2023). Chromogenic print. Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund, 2023.171.2. © Barkley L. Hendricks. Courtesy of the Estate of Barkley L. Hendricks and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York