Gordon Parks Foundation Marks 20th Anniversary

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the death of photographer and artist Gordon Parks, known for his photographs documenting the segregated South, the civil rights movement, poverty and the impact of racism on African-American life. 2026 also marks the 20th anniversary of the Gordon Parks Foundation, whose mission is to preserve Parks’ legacy but is also known for its support of the next generation of artists and writers with close ties to Parks’ practice.

“This is our 20th anniversary,” said Foundation Executive Director Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. art news in a recent interview. “Looking back 20 years later and seeing what we did and how we did it—exhibitions, collaborations with museums, publications, fellowships and fellowships—makes me very happy to see how vibrant and monumental these aspects of Gordon’s career can be through the work of the Gordon Parks Foundation.”

“Over the past 20 years, I have witnessed firsthand the profound growth, dedication and precision of the Gordon Parks Foundation,” Darren Walker, former president of the Ford Foundation, said in an email. “Gordon Parks was a transformative figure who used his camera to show the world the harsh realities of poverty, racism and bigotry. Gordon’s photographs awakened us and shook us to our hearts. Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. and his team at the Tte Gordon Parks Foundation have maintained Gordon’s influence while supporting the next generation of artists through so many important projects, and I am honored to see this important work continue.”

Kunhardt noted that Parks co-founded the foundation in 2006 with his grandfather, Phil Kunhardt, but both died within weeks of each other in March of that year, leaving him alone to chart the future of the organization while “dealing with the pain of losing these two great giants.”

Part of the foundation’s early work was to get Parks accepted into the mainstream art world, beyond his image as a photojournalist. Life Magazine. “In the early days of the foundation, it was a real struggle and a lot of hard work,” Kunhardt said. “There wasn’t much of a market for Gordon. Now that’s completely reversed.”

One important piece of advice Kunhardt received at the time came from Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “She helped me come up with the concept of going deep instead of broad: not always doing retrospectives, but going deep and focused on a project,” he said. “Each year since 2012, we have worked with the museum to shed light on a different aspect of Parks’ career, thereby generating new scholarship around specific works.”

One of the exhibitions at the Studio Museum focused on “Harlem Families,” which Phil Kunhardt collaborated with Parks on for the March 1968 issue of Life. As part of its 20th anniversary celebrations, the foundation will publish this spring a new expanded edition of the work titled Gordon Parks: Harlem Family Diary, 1967/1968. It will include unpublished texts and ephemera, including correspondence between the Parks and Fontenelle families, the themes of the series, as well as essays by Golden, NYU film professor Michael Boyce Gillespie, and director Cord Jefferson.

“The idea is that each project builds on the next,” Kunhardt said.

As part of the 20th anniversary, the Gordon Parks Foundation will help organize three park-themed gallery exhibitions. The first exhibition will open in March at Alison Jacques Gallery in London. Titled “We Will Not Be Moved,” the exhibition, curated by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson, will bring together the photographer’s iconic and rare works.

“Parks’ photos represent the struggle, the resilience and the constant struggle of black Americans,” Stevenson told reporters. art news in an email. “As an African American survivor of racial injustice, Parks is acutely aware of race and class in America, which clearly influences his work.”

Jacques last staged a two-part exhibition of Parks in 2020, which Kunhardt said was aimed at highlighting the “social justice component” of Parks’ work overseas because “there was much less awareness of who Gordon Parks was.”

April brought “Colorful South” curated by photographer Dawoud Bey at Jackson Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta. The exhibition features Parks’ 1956 series The Story of Segregation and brings to life an essay from Bey’s 2022 book Gordon Parks: The Story of Apartheid (Expanded Edition)published by Foundation and Steidl. In that article, Bay described how Parks’ color photographs from the 1950s were often reproduced in black and white, obscuring his innovations in the medium.

“Color is not the subject in Parks’s photographs but is closely integrated with the subject to enhance the physical and material experience,” he writes.

This fall, Tribeca’s Jack Sherman Gallery will open an exhibition that brings together some of Parks’ most famous works, filtered through the descendants of those who knew him or the subjects of his images. For example, Lonnie Ali, Muhammad Ali’s widow, will reflect on Parks’ impression of Ali, while Kubila Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X and Parks’ goddaughter, will look back on “Gordon and Malcolm X in Harlem in the ’60s,” Kunhardt said.

The foundation’s gallery space in Pleasantville, New York, will host multiple exhibitions throughout the year honoring past fellows, including Devin Allen, D. Watkins, Derek Fordjour, Salamishah Tillet, and Scheherazade Tillet, as well as the Gordon Parks Foundation Legacy Acquisition Fund 2026 Winners of the year, these artists’ work remains under-recognized.

“The foundation’s true purpose is to preserve and promote the legacy of Gordon Parks and has now become an umbrella for supporting art and contemporary practice and focusing on artists who have followed in Gordon Parks’ footsteps,” Kunhardt said.

Kunhardt said the core of the foundation’s work is keeping Parks’ legacy alive and filtering it through the current moment. “Gordon captured a lot of things in a way that people couldn’t do and use Life The magazine serves as a platform to showcase racial injustice and the harsh realities of racism and poverty in America,” he said. “We live in very harsh, unprecedented times, and I’m reminded of Gordon’s advocacy for fighting for what’s right, doing the right thing, and getting the message out.