Black Is Beautiful in Glassell Park, Jesse Williams Curates Kwame Brathwaite’s Unseen Photographs
The actor and the photographer’s son open You and I tonight, with pictures from 1961 to 1975 never shown before.
Tonight in Glassell Park, Philip Martin Gallery opens You and I, a show of newly released and never-before-seen photographs that Kwame Brathwaite made between 1961 and 1975. The curators are actor, director and activist Jesse Williams and Kwame S. Brathwaite, the photographer’s son and director of the Los Angeles based Kwame Brathwaite Archive.
Brathwaite, who was born in Brooklyn in 1938 and died in 2023, spent his life making Black Is Beautiful visible. He did it through his writing, his photographs and two organizations he helped found, the African Jazz-Arts Society and Studio and Grandassa Models. His touring exhibition Black Is Beautiful premiered at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles before traveling the country. Velvet also covered Coltrane in the Half Light, David Zwirner Hangs Roy DeCarava’s Jazz Photographs.
The title borrows a phrase that W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, James Baldwin and Stevie Wonder all used to connect with their audiences. Brathwaite’s portrait Stevie, dated around 1975 and listed among the works in the show, catches Wonder, a close friend, on stage in front of a crowd of thousands. The gallery has also posted a self-portrait of the young photographer holding an Argus C3, one of his first cameras, and a picture of Sikolo Brathwaite, his muse and wife of nearly sixty years, in a ruffled dress.
Williams and the younger Brathwaite have worked together before. The gallery describes You and I as a kind of second part to Kwame Brathwaite, Celebrity and the Everyday, which the pair curated at the same gallery before the pandemic. The Hollywood Reporter covered that opening and reported that the two first met at Art Basel Miami. Williams has long thought about what art can do in a mass media world, the gallery notes, and the new show asks viewers to consider what they want for themselves, each other and the world.
The opening reception runs from 6:30 to 9 p.m., with a 7 p.m. conversation between Williams and Kwame S. Brathwaite moderated by poet and dancer Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The talk is a collaboration with For Freedoms and its touring roadshow, which explores Brathwaite’s work and opens at the Ford Theater on October 3.
You and I runs through October 31. The gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
