Vivian Cherry's New York

By Vivian Cherry

"Dancer-turned-photographer Vivian Cherry has been capturing the quirks of New York City for nearly 70 years, and has yet to grow tired of it." 

--New York Daily News 

New York City is characterized by its sheer diversity, as well as the substantial level of open-mindedness consistently displayed by its residents--making it irresistible to all kinds of people from all walks of life. Centuries of large-scale waves of immigration accompanied by a steady stream of freethinking American migrants have created the archetypal melting pot that it is today. 

Photographer Vivian Cherry knows New Yorkers. This is reasonable considering she's been capturing them in their natural habitat for over half a century. One of the last surviving members of the Photo League, a cooperative of photographers that in the 1930s and 40s embraced social realism, Cherry shoots her subjects against the backdrop of the city, combining informal portraiture with gritty cityscapes. Her first powerHouse book, Helluva Town: New York City in the 1940s and 50s, was released to critical acclaim. Now she returns with Vivian Cherry's New York, a collection of work shot in the past decade, in which she continues to present her audience with pictures that are raw and real, while at the same time affectionate and warm. 

Vivian Cherry's work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the International Center of Photography; and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., amongst others, and has appeared in Popular Photography, Life, Sports Illustrated, Redbook, and Ebony, as well as the famed magazines of yesteryear: This Week, Pageant, Colliers, Amerika, and Sinclair Oil. She made several short films and worked with photographer Arnold Eagle as a still photographer on a film about Lee Strasberg and the Actors Studio. The author of Helluva Town: New York City in the 1940s and 50s (powerHouse Books, 2007), Cherry lives and works in New York City. 

Emory Douglas: Black Panther

An Exhibition Curated by Sam Durant for the New Museum

7/22/09 - 10/18/09

Some of Emory Douglas's images are nearly forty years old, but they are still as powerful as when Douglas first created them. They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the world.

Emory Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party and subsequently became its Minister of Culture, part of the national leadership. He created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party's weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979-80. Throughout the '60s and '70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.

"Emory Douglas: Black Panther" includes a wide variety of Douglas's work done while a member of the Black Panther Party. Curated by the Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, whose work often deals with political and cultural subjects in American history, the show includes approximately 165 posters, newspapers, and prints dating from 1967-76. Durant met Emory Douglas in 2002 and began working on a book of Douglas's work, which resulted in a monograph published in 2007. Two years later Durant curated "Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas" at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which serves as a model for the exhibition at the New Museum.

The presentation of "Emory Douglas: Black Panther" at the New Museum is organized by Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, with Amy Mackie, Curatorial Assistant.

All images © 2009 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York