photography

James Baldwin’s inkwell, Malcolm X’s tape recorder, a lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair. These are some of the physical manifestations of Black history, oppression and transcendence that artist Wendel White photographed for his book “Manifest: Thirteen Colonies” and the eponymous exhibition the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University.

In 1967 the world saw firsthand the horrors of Black life under apartheid South Africa in photojournalist and street photographer Ernest Cole’s, unflinching photobook, “House of Bondage.”

Throughout his decades-long career, photojournalist Don West traveled to China, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Central America and South America, capturing local life and moments.

In “Possession of A Recalcitrant Dream,” Hakeem Adewumi’s photographic installation on the exterior of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, myth, monsters and identity merge.

This is the 21st interview in a weekly series presenting highlights of conversations between leading Black visual artists in New England. In this week’s installment, artist Lucilda Dassardo-Cooper talks to artist Reginald L. Jackson.

Harriet Hayden and her husband Lewis Hayden were a Black Boston power couple in the community of abolitionists and equal right activists centered in Beacon Hill in the 1860s.

Renowned conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady, 89, a Roxbury native whose West Indian parents emigrated from Jamaica, has made her mixed-race heritage a springboard of her art.

Steve McQueen’s powerful ‘Lynching Tree’ on view at Gardner Museum for just two weeks.

For nearly a decade in the 1960s and ’70s, photographer Stephen Shames captured the Black Panther Party, recording the critical community work and activism of the group. In “Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party,” at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston through June 24, these photographs highlight the female contingent of the party, which made up more than 65% of its members.

The Fitchburg Art Museum has a collection of over 1,200 pieces of African art, according to Lauren Szumita, a former curator at the museum. Seven Black artists recently had unlimited access to the collection, thanks to an inaugural year-long residency, and they created work both inspired by and reacting to these items. 

This is the first in a weekly series presenting highlights of conversations between the Boston artist Paul Goodnight and some of New England’s leading Black visual artists.

The walls of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, are filled with images of Black life. In “As We Rise: Photography from the Black Atlantic,” moments of everyday life are exalted, illustrating both the aesthetic beauty and political power of uninterrupted Black existence.