Photo Assembly: Imperfect Documents

Aperture and the Institute of Fine Arts have joined together to establish a series of conversations that center photography as a creative act and means of responding to urgent questions in the world around us. This convening of photo-committed makers and thinkers fosters a critical yet community-oriented environment for reflection and learning.

In 1935, Walker Evans was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, to photograph hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art. Nearly ninety years later, the artist David Alekhuogie began investigating Evans’s images, provocatively remixing them into his own vibrant and multilayered photographic collages. Alekhuogie’s first major monograph draws upon the musical idiom of the reprise—a performance of repetition—and stakes a claim to crucial, restorative ideas around Black antiquity by questioning our relationship to what we consider fake or original, art or archive.  

This April, David Alekhuogie: A Reprise (Aperture, 2025) will act as the point of departure for our panelists as they confront the intriguing legacy of narrative and authorship behind Western presentations of African art. Prita Meier, an associate professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts, will moderate a conversation between David Alekhuogie and esteemed speakers Zoë Hopkins, a writer and critic featured in A Reprise, and Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

Although seating is limited to invited guests, a recording of the event will be available through Aperture’s YouTube channel. 

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David Alekhuogie: A Reprise

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David Alekhuogie (born in Los Angeles, 1986) is a documentary photographer. He received his MFA from Yale University and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work was included in Companion Pieces, the 2020 iteration of the Museum of Modern Art’s biennial New Photography series, and was presented in Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles. In 2019, he was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation’s Emerging Artist Grant. Alekhuogie has had solo exhibitions at Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery; Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles; and the Chicago Artist Coalition, and has participated in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco; and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. His work has been published in Aperture, Foam, the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time, Vice, and the Los Angeles Times. He is based in Los Angeles.

Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. She received her BA in art history and African American studies from Harvard University and is currently working on her MA in modern and contemporary art at Columbia University. Her writing has been published in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, Cultured, and Hyperallergic.

Prita Meier is an associate professor of art history at the Institute of Fine Arts and the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University. Meier holds a PhD from Harvard University and is an Africanist art and architectural historian who looks at visual culture and built space through the lenses of circulation, empire, and globalization. Her book Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016) explores the contested meanings of coral-stone built landscapes during the age of empire. Her most recent book, The Surface of Things: A History of Photography of the Swahili Coast (2024), repositions the continent’s islands and archipelagos at the center of global photographic histories. 

Drew Sawyer is an art historian and Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He has previously held curatorial positions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio. Sawyer holds a PhD in art history from Columbia University. He received a 2020 Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators.

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Image composite: David Alekhuogie, from David Alekhuogie: A Reprise (Aperture, 2025). © David Alekhuogie