Gordon Parks Foundation Names 2024 Fellows

The Gordon Parks Foundation has announced conceptual artist Larry W. Cook and photographer Tonika Lewis Johnson as the recipients of its 2024 fellowships. The organization named author D.

Watkins 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; Cook and Johnson will exhibit their work in respective solo shows at the foundation’s Pleasantville, New York, gallery. “Through their art and writing, our 2024 fellows have brought attention to systemic racism and community activism,” said Peter W.

Kunhardt Jr., the foundation’s executive director, in a statement. “We are proud to support Larry, Tonika, and D. as they continue to enact change through their art in much the same way Gordon Parks did throughout his lifetime.”RelatedBRENT SIKKEMA (1948–2024)FRANCE APPOINTS RIGHT-WING CULTURE MINISTER The foundation inaugurated the arts fellowships in 2017 in honor of Parks, who received similar support early in his photography career.

The Genevieve Young Fellowship in Writing, named for Parks’s former wife, a noted book editor, was launched in 2022, expanding the foundation’s reach and honoring Young’s work. Cook, whose practice encompasses photography, video, and mixed media, is an associate professor of photography at Washington, DC’s Howard University, which partnered with the Gordon Parks Foundation in support of his fellowship. Launching his career as a nightclub photographer, Cook brought the lessons learned in that capacity to bear as he expanded his territory to include prisons.

Frequently photographing his subjects in both settings against makeshift or handmade backdrops, he examines the pose as it relates to issues of freedom and belonging. Johnson, who was raised in the Englewood neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, is a social justice artist as well as a photographer. Interested in fostering positive changes in both real estate and land-use practices, she investigates issues of urban segregation, the preservation of Black cultural memory—particularly that of Chicago—and injustices and inequities revealed in the city’s built environment and social networks.

D. Watkins, who lives and works in Baltimore, is an author and serves as editor-at-large forSalon. Seeking to dispel the notion that violence is currency, he explores issues of class, race, and masculinity as well as the emotional lives of urban youth.

Among the books he has written to date are theNew York TimesbestsellerThe Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America(2015) andBlack Boy Smile(2022). All three fellows will be celebrated at the annual Gordon Parks FoundationAwardsDinner, to be held in New York on May 21, 2024. The event, which will include a special tribute to actor Richard Roundtree and Shaft (the iconic character he portrayed in Parks’s 1971 film), will also honor musicians Alicia Keys and Kasseem Dean (aka Swizz Beatz), artist Mickalene Thomas, football player Colin Kaepernick, and civil rights activist and journalist Myrlie Evers-Williams..