See Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison; Meet Mrs Paul Robeson

Did you know that legendary photographer Gordon Parks and legendary author Ralph Ellison were friends, and collaborated in the late 40s, early 50s? I sure didn't, but thanks to the Art Institute of Chicago, I do now. If you haven't already, check out "Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem", running through August 28th, which exhibits Parks' photographic illustrations of scenes from Ellison's novel, which originally appeared in Life magazine. As the exhibit states:

This exhibition reunites for the first time the surviving photographs and texts intended for the two projects, including never-before-seen photographs by Parks from the collections of the Art Institute and the Gordon Parks Foundation and unpublished manuscripts by Ellison. Revealed in these frank depictions of Harlem is Ellison and Parks’s symbiotic insistence on making race a larger, universal issue, finding an alternative, productive means of representing African American life, and importantly, staking a claim for the black individual within—rather than separate from—the breadth of American culture.

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At the moment I'm reading...

Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson

Tags:  /  Biographies & Memoirs

Check the Library Catalog

Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode Robeson lived a colorful and amazing life. Her career and commitments took her many places: colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalin's Russia, and China two months after Mao's revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishment—an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women's rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband. In this masterful book, biographer Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating black women of the twentieth century. 

Let me know what you think! Possible book discussion for the fall?

See you all on June 21st for The Sellout! Several copies still available at the 2nd floor desk; call 847-448-8620 to get one.