Gordon Parks: Collages by Peter Beard - Exhibition at the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks: Collages by Peter Beard - Exhibition at the Gordon Parks Foundation

Gordon Parks: Collages by Peter Beard
January 18 - April 23

 

Artist Reception January 22
6 to 8 p.m. at 48 Wheeler Avenue, Pleasantville, New York, 10570
 

The Gordon Parks Foundation is proud to present Gordon Parks: Collages by Peter Beard, featuring unique collages made by Beard in 2013, incorporating and inspired by some of the best-known photographs from Parks’ legendary career. Friends and colleagues, these two pioneering figures shared an abiding interest in the power of photography to bring public attention to injustice, and to inspire passion for social change.


Beard and Parks were friends and colleagues, mutual admirers from the moment they met through their agent, Peter Schub. In the early 1960s, Parks was an editorial magazine photographer for LIFE and Beard did some work for Diana Vreeland at VOGUE while he was studying art at Yale. Among their earliest interactions, Parks enlisted Beard as a model for a fashion shoot…”Peter Pan in Central Park.” But their shared respect went deeper, resting on their common interest in using the camera as a tool to address social and environmental problems. Parks’ empathetic picture stories brought wide public attention to the lives of the poor and marginalized, while Beard’s searing photographs of Kenya’s Tsavo wilderness, soon to be published in The End of the Game: The Last Word from Paradise, told the harrowing story of East Africa’s despoiled ecosystem and the endangerment of its wildlife.