Aperture Tours New Photography Exhibitions This Spring

New York, February 18, 2025— Aperture’s touring exhibitions share the photography and ideas developed through Aperture’s publishing program with audiences across the United States and around the world. This year, Aperture presents the inaugural exhibition of photographs from Ernest Cole’s travels in the US and new work by Carrie Mae Weems, while continuing tours of acclaimed exhibitions on Japanese women photographers, Native perspectives, and the role of photography within Latinx art. 

Ernest Cole: The True America
Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota
February 1 through June 22, 2025

The True America is the first comprehensive presentation of newly published photographs by Ernest Cole, the renowned South African photographer, taken in the United States from the late 1960s to early ’70s. Featuring more than 125 images, the exhibition is curated by Leslie M. Wilson, associate director for academic engagement and research at the Art Institute of Chicago and essayist for the accompanying book.

After fleeing South Africa to publish his landmark book House of Bondage (1967) about the horrors of apartheid, Ernest Cole became a “banned person” and resettled in New York, chronicling daily life in Harlem and around Manhattan. In 1968 he traveled across the country to major cities as well as rural areas in the South, capturing the activism and emotional tenor in the months leading up to and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The True America reflects the contradictions between a newfound hope and freedom that Cole experienced in the United States alongside the systemic racism and injustice he witnessed. This exhibition is made possible, in part, with generous support from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

2024 Paris-Photo Aperture Photobook Awards
Printed Matter, New York
January 16 through February 25, 2024

Celebrating the evolving narrative of the photobook, the twelfth annual Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards recognize excellence in photobook publishing. Selected from thirty-five titles shortlisted by an international jury, the 2024 awards were given to Tsai Ting Bang’s Born from the Same Root (Self-published, Taipei), for First PhotoBook; Taysir Batniji’s Disruptions (Loose Joints Publishing, Marseille, France / London), for PhotoBook of the Year; and Shining Lights: Black Women Photographers in 1980s–90s Britain, Joy Gregory, editor, and Taous Dahmani, associate editor (Autograph and MACK, London), for Photography Catalog of the Year; while Hady Barry’s i am (not) your mother (Self-published, Penumbra Foundation, New York) was selected as the Jurors’ Special Mention. These award-winning photobooks, along with the thirty-five shortlisted titles, are on view at Printed Matter, in New York, after an initial presentation at Paris Photo.

Following the New York presentation, the PhotoBookAwards will be on view at the Leipzig Photo Festival, on March 15 and 16.

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now
Fotomuseum Den Haag, the Hague, Netherlands
January 18 through March 7, 2025

I’m So Happy You Are Here offers a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established photography canon—resulting in an electrifying expansion of our understanding of not only Japanese photographic history but also of photo-history writ large. With a focus on material from the 1950s to now, I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a selection of intergenerational artists—many of whom have been recognized for their vital contributions, while others have developed unique and important practices without substantial public recognition. Curated by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko, and Pauline Vermare, this exhibition provides a solid foundation for a more nuanced and expansive conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography.

After the presentation in the Hague, I’m So Happy You Are Here will be on view at the Fotografie Forum Frankfurt, from May 24 to September 7, 2025.

You Belong Here: Place, People and Purpose in Latinx Photography
Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin
December 9, 2024, through March 7, 2025

You Belong Here: Place, People, and Purpose in Latinx Photography celebrates the vast visual archive of Latinx art in the United States. Curated by Pilar Tompkins Rivas, chief curator and deputy director of Curatorial and Collections at the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, in Los Angeles, You Belong Here originates from “Latinx,” the Winter 2021 issue of Aperture magazine, guest edited by Tompkins Rivas. The Aperture issue and exhibition features work by over fifteen established as well as emerging artists who illustrate a range of histories and geographies, contextualize and reinterpret watershed social and artistic movements, stake space for queerness, and articulate the importance of photography within the larger field of Latinx art. The exhibition includes work by Laura Aguilar, Genesis Báez, William Camargo, Steven Molina Contreras, Star Montana, Eddie Quiñones, Reynaldo Rivera, Guadalupe Rosales, Gabriela Ruiz and Bibs Moreno, and John M. Valadez.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of  the Matter
Gallerie d’Italia, Turin
April 17 through September 7, 2025

In collaboration with Intesa Sanpaolo and the Gallerie d’Italia, Turin, Aperture presents Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter. Tracing a spiritual and personal journey through the career of the acclaimed American artist Carrie Mae Weems, this retrospective shares her distinctive approach to addressing history, representation, and injustice through the lens of race, gender, and class, while often centering Weems as a historical reference point, guide, or muse. Weems’s photography is deeply rooted in places often excluded from historical narratives—artists’ studios, plantations in the American South, domestic spaces, and the “invisible institutions” born of violence and oppression that sheltered Black Americans during worship—juxtaposed against images of monuments and museums that have been historic sites of exclusion. Featuring a range of photographs and several video installations drawn from the artist’s most well-known bodies of work, the exhibition will also debut an ambitious and powerful installation exploring religion and spirituality that was commissioned for this project and accompanying monograph. Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter is curated by Sarah Meister, the Executive Director of Aperture.

Native America: In Translation
Asheville Art Museum, North Carolina
July 24 through November 24, 2025

Native America: In Translation, curated by artist Wendy Red Star as an expansion of her role as guest editor of Aperture Fall 2020 issue “Native America,” considers the wide-ranging work of photographers and lens-based artists who pose challenging questions about land rights, identity and heritage, and histories of colonialism. With essential works by Rebecca Belmore, Nalikutaar Jacqueline Cleveland, Martine Gutierrez, Duane Linklater, Guadalupe Maravilla, Kimowan Metchewais, Alan Michelson, Koyoltzintli, and Marianne Nicolson, the exhibition and accompanying Aperture publication look at the historic, often fraught relationship between photography and Native representation, while also offering new perspectives by emerging artists who reimagine what it means to be a citizen in North America today.

About Aperture
Aperture is a nonprofit publisher that leads conversations around photography worldwide. From its base in New York, Aperture connects global audiences and supports artists through its acclaimed quarterly magazine, books, exhibitions, digital platforms, public programs, limited-edition prints, and awards. Established in 1952 to advance “creative thinking, significantly expressed in words and photographs, Aperture champions photography’s vital role in nurturing curiosity and encouraging a more just, tolerant society.

Aperture’s programs and operations are made possible by the generosity of our board of trustees, our members, and other individuals, and with major support from 7G Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Charina Endowment Fund, Documentary Arts, Ford Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, Marta Heflin Foundation, Ishibashi Foundation, Joy of Giving Something, Anne Levy Charitable Trust, Henry Luce Foundation, Mailman Foundation, MurthyNAYAK Foundation, Grace Jones Richardson Trust, San Francisco Foundation, Thomas R. Schiff Foundation, Jane Smith Turner Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Stuart B. Cooper and R. L. Besson, Kate Cordsen and Denis O’Leary, Thomas and Susan Dunn, Agnes Gund, Michael Sonnenfeldt, Jon Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and New York State Council on the Arts, with support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

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For more information on exhibitions or their corresponding publications, contact:
Lauren Van Natten, +1 212.946.7151, publicity@aperture.org