A Show at the National Gallery Highlights the Role of Photography in the Black Arts Movement

In a 1968 photograph by Doris Derby, a young girl longingly peers into the window of a toy store in Jackson, Mississippi. Within the image, Derby captures another photographer holding an 8mm camera, kneeling and holding the camera at the child’s eye level. While Derby’s photograph of a child dreaming of play is resonant for its tender simplicity, this era was marked by very different images of life in Mississippi, from the indelible photos of the open-casket funeral of Emmett Till in Chicago in 1955 to the iconic images of the 1963 lunch counter sit-ins in Jackson. Photojournalistic images spanning more than a decade covering protests, demonstrations, and demands for justice became trenchant reminders of the social and political tumult of the time.

This juxtaposition of unrest and stillness is one of multiple focal points of “Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985”at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (on view through January 11, 2026). The exhibition, featuring some 150 images and works of art, is a survey of Black photographers who documented the civil rights and Black liberation movements and imaged civil rights leaders, equality workers, activists, and the constellation of musicians, artists, intellectuals, poets, writers, and filmmakers whose work catalyzed and sustained the Black Arts Movement. Activists not only used photographic images to demand change, they employed the medium to create an aesthetic around Black liberation, beauty, and power.

“Photography was central to the Black Arts Movement because they were not only documenting, they were artists who were part of the movement,” says artist, writer, and educator Deborah Willis, who curated the show with Philip Brookman, a consulting curator in the photography department at the National Gallery. “Some of the people who were making images at that time were not known as [art] photographers,” Willis adds.

Derby, for instance, studied cultural anthropology in New York before becoming a SNCC field secretary and photographer. Her pictures not only highlight the role of Black women in the movement, they capture quieter moments that counterbalance the imagery that defined it in the media. “I knew her for a number of years, and it was not until close to the end of her life that I learned of these other images that she made, seeing little girls sitting, having ice cream on a porch bench in a store in the South.”

An underlying sentiment found within the works selected in the exhibition is a refusal of Black artists—and by extension the Black liberation movement—to be defined by a single medium, voice, or ideology. These manifold expressions of Blackness present a fuller picture of how Black artists helped shape, define, and archive the various elements of the Black Arts Movement. Through the work of the 100 or so artists included in the show, we see intersections between artistic and liberation movements that span geographic and ideological divides; we also see moments when those ideologies clash, sparking growth and change.

The opening essay of the exhibition catalog was penned by the legendary political activist, author, and scholar Angela Davis. “Successful movements always incorporate a central relationship to the imagination, and thus to the art making and aesthetic knowledge that help us to feel new futures and to experience new ways of imagining those futures,” she writes.

While the Black Arts Movement is generally pegged to the 1960s and ’70s, the point of departure for Willis and Brookman was the work of photographer Roy DeCarava, who in 1955, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, released a book titled The Sweet Flypaper of Life. The book featured portraits of Black life in Harlem activated by a fictitious character named Mary Bradley, a narrative invention of Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes.

In the book, Sister Mary’s musings unfold within DeCarava’s photographic landscape. The exhibition includes an image from the book featuring bassist Edna Smith, whose face is partially illuminated by a single light in the distance. Her downward gaze conveys a sense of somberness that’s echoed by the shadows that surround her, while the single glint of light coming off her wristwatch draws attention to the bass like the beacon from a lighthouse.

Published decades following the Harlem Renaissance, one year after Brown v. Board of Education and months after the murder of Emmitt Till, DeCarava’s book came at a critical moment in art history, a time when photography became more broadly recognized as fine art through groundbreaking exhibitions like “The Family of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art, also in 1955. With that recognition, Black artists seized an opportunity to compose compelling visual narratives. “The collaboration between Langston Hughes and Roy De Carava was influential for so many photographers and artists, in part because De Carava and Hughes were looking at their respective communities, and they put together a story that was looking inward,” says Brookman.

One goal of the exhibition is to highlight the various ways photography contributed to a visual milieu around the Black Arts Movement, from fashion and beauty to community building and social justice. “We started thinking about how we tell the story of the impact of photography, not as an illustration of a moment but as an integral part of a movement,” says Willis. “Many of [its] artists, painters, collagists, and sculptors used . . . pivotal images from that time period in their artwork,” she adds.

Photography took on many forms in the art created during the period covered in the National Gallery show. Some were sartorial images, like Barkley Hendricks’s photograph of a Philadelphia man in a white-on-white suit, white hat, and matching shoes, later immortalized in Hendricks’s 1973 painting Dr. Kool. Other works used archival photos, like Betye Saar’s iconographic exploration of a minstrel turned pan-African revolutionary, Let Me Entertain You (1972), a three-panel assemblage. In the background of the central panel, Saar features a copy of a lynching photograph. In the last panel, the background is painted in the colors of the pan-African flag, symbolizing the transformation of a dehumanized Jim Crow construction to a liberated, self-actualized Black figure.

There is a special emphasis on Black women in the exhibition, not only as subjects but also as image makers themselves. From Ming Smith and her ethereal photographs of Sun Ra appearing to materialize out of stardust in Sun Ra Space II (1978) and Marilyn Nance’s comprehensive coverage of FESTAC ’77 in Lagos, Nigeria, to Jeanne Moutousamy-Ashe and Doris Derby’s exploration of Afro Carolina traditions in the South, Black women occupy a unique (and underrecognized) space in the medium and the movement.

Other works of art in the show are a testament to the medium’s lasting influence on established visual artists. Among these was Romare Bearden, who in the mid-1960s began exploring photographic collage; it would become an art form he used to create his most influential works. “Romare Bearden has always been integral to understanding the Black Arts Movement,” says Brookman. “By using photographs in his collages, he makes a direct connection between photography in all of its forms and the Black Arts Movement. That was something I had not seen or thought a lot about before, how much photography is incorporated into his visual art, including painting, during that time.”

Artists including Jeff Donaldson and muralist William Walker founded the Organization of Black American Culture, a predecessor of AfriCOBRA in Chicago, and organized a collaborative artwork for the city called The Wall of Respect,a 1967 outdoor mural that included more than 50 portraits of Black leaders, activists, athletes, and musicians who have influenced Black culture. The National Gallery exhibition includes a recently uncovered image by photographer Roy Lewis of singer Nina Simone standing in front of the mural, which no longer exists.

Through stolen moments and carefully cultivated images, photography is a powerful medium for preserving memory, strengthening connection, and imagining new realities. It continues to teach us new lessons in resistance, solidarity, and agency. “The work that was done by artists and photographers before, during, and after the Black Arts Movement establishes a strategy of community engagement,” says Brookman. “It is that engagement that allows communities to define themselves and also to engage people in new forms of looking.”