Gordon Parks Foundation Launches Collection-Building Initiative, Names 2025 Fellows
144Jan. 15, 2025
The Gordon Parks Foundation today announced the inauguration of itsLegacy Initiative, a collection-building fund aimed at mid- and late-career artists whose practices are reflective of Parks’s ownlife and legacy. Parks, a self-taught photographer, is renowned for his documentary photography of the 1940s–70s, particularly that focused on the civil rights movement. Each year, the foundation will identify and work directly with artists to purchase a group of artworks. These works will enter the organization’s permanent collection, where they will be available for study, research, and exhibitions, and featured in exhibitions at the foundation’s gallery; educational information about the artists and their life’s work will appear on its website.
Mikki Ferrill and LeRoy Henderson, two members of Gordon Parks’s circle, are the first artists to be honored by the initiative. Both photographers placed their art in the service of advocacy and fostering human connection, their respective practices at once embodying and expanding on Parks’s commitment to social justice and community engagement.
The foundation additionally announced interdisciplinary artist and educator Derek Fordjour and photographer and feminist activist Scheherazade Tillet as the recipients of its 2025 art fellowships. The organization named Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Salamishah Tillet, a contributing critic at large for the New York Times, as the Genevieve Young Fellow in Writing. Each will receive an award of $25,000 in aid of new and ongoing projects centered around representation and social justice; Fordjour and Scheherazade Tillet will receive solo shows at the foundation’s Pleasantville, New York, gallery; the organization will acquire work by both for its permanent collection.
“The Gordon Parks Foundation’s grant, prize, and acquisition initiatives are an integral part of our mission, as we strive to support the kind of artistic networks that were vital to Gordon’s own career,” said Peter W. Kunhardt Jr., the organization’s executive director, in a statement. “Gordon received the Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for photography in 1941 and it’s an honor to be able to continue providing the same impactful support to artists who we are inspired by, and who share Gordon Parks’s creative goals and the mission of the foundation. Having the work of these artists in our collection, alongside Gordon’s own photographic archive, ensures that this work will be made available for future generations of artists and scholars.”
The abovementioned honorees will be celebrated at the annual Gordon Parks Foundation Awards Dinner, to be held in New York on May 20.