Throughout the twentieth century, nearly every small town in the United States boasted a local studio photographer. Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography アーカイブ takes a look at that history, focusing on the work of Black photographers working in urban neighborhoods and rural villages across eastern Texas from 1944 to 1984. Join Nicole R. Fleetwood, exhibition curator and Paulette Goddard Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and LeRonn P. Brooks, curator at the Getty Research Institute, in discussion at Art + Practice.
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Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (NYU Steinhardt) and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (NYU College of Arts and Science). A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art and cultural history, aesthetics, photography and documentary studies, and art and activism. She is the author of several books including Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Harvard University Press, 2020), winner of the National Book Critics Award in Criticism. Fleetwood curated the traveling exhibition, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, which debuted at MoMA PS1 in 2020 and traveled through 2024. Most recently, she curated Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive and co-edited with Brian Wallis the compendium catalog published by Aperture. Her nonfiction book, Between the River and Railroad Tracks—a memoir and cultural history of the black Midwest— will be published by Little, Brown in fall 2026.
Photo Credit: Naima Green
LeRonn P. Brooks is an art historian and curator of the African American Art History Initiative at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), where he also leads the development of African American collections and acquisitions. Prior to joining the Getty, he served as Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Lehman College and as a curator with the Racial Imaginary Institute, founded by poet Claudia Rankine. Brooks received his PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His curatorial work has been instrumental in shaping major archival holdings, including the Johnson Publishing Company Archive, the Paul R. Williams Archive, the Maren Hassinger Archive, the Richard Hunt Archive, and the Dr. Robert Farris Thompson Archive. A widely published scholar, Brooks’s interviews and essays on African American art and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, The International Review of African American Art、 と 絞り, as well as in numerous exhibition catalogues, including Dawoud Bey: Elegy (2023), Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging (2023), A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 (2023), and Faith Ringgold: American People (2022). He is currently co-editor and co-curator of the first monograph and retrospective exhibition on architect Paul R. Williams, I Am an Architect, drawn from Williams’s archive at the Getty Research Institute.
Photo credit: Cassia Davis