11/11/2025
Investigating the social structures and sites of religious practice documented through Gordon Parks’s photographs from the 1940s to the 1980s, the exhibition at Howard University, presented by the University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, frames Parks’s underexplored religious and spiritual examinations through his photographs that captured the prominent role of religion and spirituality in 20th-century modern life. Comprised of over 40 objects including photos and archival documents, including works from the Gordon Parks Legacy Collection acquired by Howard University in 2022. Temples of Hope, Rituals of Survival: Gordon Parks and Black Religious Life is curated by Dr. Melanee C. Harvey, Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University, and the Gordon Parks Foundation's 2023 Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing. Accompanying the exhibition is the publication Gordon Parks, Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church, Chicago, 1953, published by The Gordon Parks Foundation, Steidl, and Howard University.
