‘I want a continuity of beautiful pictures and beautiful movement,’ Gordon Parks is quoted as saying about his first feature-length film, The Learning Tree (1969), in a Time magazine piece entitled ‘Where Black Is Too Beautiful.’ Reviewing the chromatically vibrant and lush visual language Parks uses to tell his autobiographical story about racial prejudice in the American Midwest, the Time critic draws attention to the politics of beauty in the film, which Parks structures according to an expansive understanding of color. Experimenting with a host of techniques that dynamized color in various ways, Parks put pressure on the restrictive social and political contours of color that he negotiated as an African American artist, extending and refining the strategies of the color work he produced for Vogue fashion spreads and Life magazine photo-essays. This lecture brings these seemingly disparate bodies of work together to explain color’s complex significance to Park’s aesthetic and to late 1960s American culture more broadly.
Jennifer Greenhill is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. She specializes in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art and visual culture, with an emphasis on intermedial and intercultural objects, race and the politics of visuality, and intersections between elite and popular forms of expression She has been Terra Foundation Visiting Professor at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, Frances and is the author of Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012), and A Companion to American Art (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), a co-edited collection of 35 essays by leading scholars who debate the geographic, historiographic, material and conceptual borders of the field. Her essay for the book examines the politics of “close looking” and argues for an expansive and diffuse conception of the visual in writing about race. An article underway, on the photographic and filmic techniques of Gordon Parks, further develops these ideas.