Leslie Wilson: Is This the America of Ebony?

Join Leslie Wilson, Academic Curator and Director of Research Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago, as she explores the complexities of South African photojournalist Ernest Cole’s documentary work in the United States. The exhibition, organized by Aperture and on view in Mia’s Harrison Gallery, is the first to present Cole’s photojournalism work from across the United States in the pivotal era of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as seen in Ernest Cole: The True America (Aperture, 2024).

Soon after his arrival in 1967, Cole began work on a project to document Black communities across the nation, from his base in New York to the West Coast and Southeastern United States. Throughout his travels, Cole wrestled with his expectations of America–ones powerfully shaped by his reading of magazines like Ebony, Life, and Look–and the cultural realities of his experiences. Wilson’s talk expands upon her curatorial work in the exhibition, “The True America: Photographs by Ernest Cole.”

RSVP is required. Purchase tickets here. 

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Ernest Cole (born in Transvaal, South Africa, 1940; died in New York, 1990) is best known for House of Bondage, a photobook published in 1967 that chronicles the horrors of apartheid. After fleeing South Africa in 1966, he became a “banned person,” settling in New York. He was associated with Magnum Photos and received funding from the Ford Foundation to undertake a project looking at Black communities and cultures in the United States. Cole spent an extensive time in Sweden and became involved with the Tiofoto collective. He died at age forty-nine of cancer. In 2017, more than 60,000 of Cole’s negatives—missing for more than forty years—resurfaced in Sweden.Leslie M. Wilson is Associate Director for Academic Engagement and Research at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her research, teaching, and curatorial endeavors focus on the history of photography, the arts of Africa and the African diaspora, modern and contemporary American art, and museum studies. Her current and forthcoming projects include not all realisms: photography, Africa, and the long 1960s at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art where she was a curatorial fellow from 2019 to 2021, and David Goldblatt: No ulterior motive at the Art Institute of Chicago with co-curators Matthew Witkovsky (AIC) and Judy Ditner (Yale). She has recently written for publications including Dear Dave, FOAM Magazine, and Manual, and interviewed Larry W. Cook for Weiss Berlin. From 2017-2021, she was Assistant Professor of Art History at Purchase College, SUNY. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Chicago and a BA in International Relations from Wellesley College.