National Gallery Exhibition Opens November 7: 70 Early Photographs Picture African American Life
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will open Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography on November 7 in Gallery 30 of the West Building's ground floor. The exhibition runs through March 14, 2027, with free admission and no passes required.
It brings together about 70 photographs from the museum's collection, including works from the Ross J. Kelbaugh Collection acquired in 2023, several shown publicly for the first time. Organized in three sections, Black Entrepreneurs, Portraits and The Studio, it traces Black photographers active from the 1840s, among them J.P. Ball, the Goodridge brothers and Augustus Washington, and later figures including Addison Scurlock, James Van Der Zee and Coreen Simpson. The display includes an 1848 portrait of Patty Atavis, an enslaved woman in Maryland.
To protect the light-sensitive early photographs, the galleries use low light levels, and the chronological hang follows how Black photographers and their sitters used portraiture to record autonomy, self-respect and family life at the dawn of American photography.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 国家美术馆西楼，Gunnar Klack摄，维基共享资源CC BY-SA 2.0 / The West Building of the National Gallery of Art, photo by Gunnar Klack, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
