With a profession that spanned over 50 years, photographer, filmmaker, musician and writer Gordon Parks captured American life and tradition via his lens. No skilled coaching wanted, his eye to doc social justice, race relations, the civil rights motion and the Black American expertise was sharp and centered, incomes him awards and accolades at each flip and galvanizing photographers of coloration for many years to come back.
Parks and his work will as soon as once more be celebrated on the Gordon Parks Basis’s Annual Awards Dinner and Public sale of Choose Parks’ pictures. This yr’s gala, which shall be held on Could 20 at Cipriani 42 in New York Metropolis, will honor legendary mannequin and activist Bethann Hardison; acclaimed modern artist Rashid Johnson; Condé Nast Chief Content material Officer and International Editorial Director of Vogue, Anna Wintour; and politician, minister and civil rights chief Andrew Younger, who was U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former mayor of Atlanta.
GRAMMY Award-winning musician, actress and EBONY cowl star Andra Day will carry out at this yr’s gala together with a particular musical interlude by The Roots’ Dave Man. Presenters embody Emmy Award winner and Oscar nominee Colman Domingo; conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas; dressmaker and writer Aurora James; mannequin and actor Tyson Beckford; and artistic director, activist and photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe.
“Our gala is our homecoming, full of like-minded folks coming collectively for one evening to have fun Gordon’s imaginative and prescient and the mission of the inspiration,” mentioned Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Government Director of The Gordon Parks Basis. “Many individuals who’ve attended over the previous 17 years knew Gordon personally, so it’s very a lot about honoring his legacy and desirous about easy methods to cross on his ardour for social justice and humanities activism to the following technology.”
The night’s particular visitors embody the son and grandson of Rev. E.F. Ledbetter, whom Gordon Parks photographed extensively in Chicago in 1953 for a narrative on the Metropolitan Missionary Baptist Church. These pictures are at the moment on show at Howard College via December 5.
The newly shaped Gordon Parks Basis Legacy Fund, centered on mid- and late-career artists whose enduring work is linked to Parks’ life and legacy, will acknowledge two celebrated artists and members of Gordon Parks’ circle, Mikki Ferrill and LeRoy Henderson. The Gordon Parks Basis’s Artwork Fellowships and the Gordon Parks Basis’s Genevieve Younger Fellowship in Writing can even be awarded.
The Gordon Parks Basis helps and produces creative and academic initiatives that advance the legacy and imaginative and prescient of Gordon Parks—acknowledged as essentially the most vital American photographer of the twentieth century, in addition to a author, musician and filmmaker, who used the humanities to additional “the frequent seek for a greater life and a greater world.
Alicia Keys, Kasseem Dean, and Tonya and Spike Lee return as co-chairs for the 2025 Gordon Parks Basis Annual Awards Dinner, together with Ben Stiller, Christine Taylor, Anderson Cooper, Sarah Arison, Kathryn Chenault, Kenneth Chenault, Michi Jigarjian, Judy Lauder, Leonard Lauder, Carol Sutton Lewis, William M. Lewis, Jr., Crystal McCrary, Raymond McGuire, Gail Yabuki, Jeff Yabuki, Alex Soros, Huma Abedin, and Clara Wu Tsai.
All proceeds from the night will help year-round academic programming and the fellowships, prizes and scholarships supplied by The Gordon Parks Basis to the following technology of artists, writers, and college students whose work follows in Parks’ footsteps. Restricted tickets can be found beginning at $2,000 and may be bought on the Gordon Parks Basis web site.