Special Viewing of Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite

Dr. Agnes Hsu-tang, Chair and Dr. Louise Mirrer, President & CEO invite members to a special viewing of Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite.

Please also join us that evening for the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Distinguished Speakers Series program: Black Is Beautiful. Kwame S. Brathwaite and historian Tanisha C. Ford will join moderator Khalil Gibran Muhammad to discuss the exhibition and legacy of the photographs on view.

Eligible members will receive email invitations directly. Not an Aperture Member? See here or email membership@aperture.org for details.

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In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Kwame Brathwaite used his photography to popularize the political slogan “Black Is Beautiful.” The Aperture monograph Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite—the first ever dedicated to Brathwaite’s remarkable career—tells the story of a key, but under-recognized, figure of the second Harlem Renaissance.

Through January 16, 2023, the New-York Historical Society is the exclusive New York City venue for the accompanying exhibition of the same name, which features forty large-scale color and black-and-white photographs from the artist’s remarkable career.

Kwame S. Brathwaite, son of photographer Kwame Brathwaite, is director of the Kwame Brathwaite Archive.

Tanisha C. Ford, a professor of history at the Graduate Center, CUNY, is an acclaimed writer and historian working at the intersection of politics and culture.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a New-York Historical Society trustee, is Ford Foundation Professor of History, Race, and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Exhibition organized by Aperture, New York and Kwame S. Brathwaite. The exhibition Black Is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite and the accompanying Aperture publication are made possible, in part, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Photographic Arts Council Los Angeles.

Image: Kwame Brathwaite, Sikolo Brathwaite wearing a headpiece designed by Carolee Prince, African Jazz-Art Society & Studios (AJASS), Harlem, ca. 1968; from Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019)