The exhibition ‘Homeward to the Prairie I Come’: Gordon Parks Photographs from the Beach Museum of Art will soon travel to six venues around the country beginning in the fall of 2024. The museum’s 2021–2022 Gordon Parks exhibition was co-curated by Beach Museum staff Aileen June Wang and Sarah Price. The tour is organized by the Beach Museum with major support from Art Bridges, a foundation led by philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton, which aims to expand access to American art across the country.
The first stop is Syracuse University Art Museum in August 2024. Co-curator Aileen June Wang will deliver the keynote presentation there in September 2024.
Tour schedule:
Syracuse, Syracuse NY: August 22 – December 10, 2024
Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT: January 19 – March 30, 2025
Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, KS: April 19 – July 20, 2025
Additional venues planned during August 2025 – January 2026:
Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK: February 12 – May 24, 2026
Brigham Young University Provo, UT: July – November 21, 2026
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, AL: December 18, 2026 – March 14, 2027
Learn more about the museum’s exhibition and its open-access digital catalog, part of a collaboration with K-State English here. Major support for the catalog comes from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
K-State English maintains the open-access website The Learning Tree: A Gordon Parks Digital Archive, also supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
In addition to the traveling exhibition, Curator Aileen June Wang and Gordon Parks Museum Director Kirk Sharp organized a convening in March 2024 for the six host museums in Fort Scott, Kansas, generously supported by Art Bridges, with additional support from Fort Scott Community College and the Gordon Parks Museum. Convening presenters were Andrew F. Scott, associate professor of arts and technology at the University of Texas Dallas, and Beach Museum of Art staff. Beach Museum Specialist Nate McClendon and his band presented an interpretation of the Gordon Parks exhibition through music and narration.
Thursday, February 24, 2022, 5:30 p.m. Central Time (US and Canada)
Doug Barrett is a photographer and videographer based in Manhattan, Kansas. His work demonstrates how Gordon Parks continues to inspire contemporary artists. Barrett’s projects include interviewing, photographing, and telling the stories of homeless veterans, creating a collective portrait of the Yuma Street community of Manhattan, Kansas, and documenting the Black Lives Matter movement in Kansas.
Organized by the museum in collaboration with K-State’s Information Technology Services and Cytek Media System Inc., this experimental multimedia installation is guaranteed to surprise and delight! It features the mysterious beauty of an ancient artifact through specially composed music and unique video animation. See the past differently!
This exhibition features photographs donated by Parks to Kansas State University (K-State) in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1973. It was the first time that the artist personally curated a set of photographs to donate to a public institution, a kind of self-portrait directed towards the home crowd. The exhibition title includes the first line of a poem written by Parks in 1984, commissioned by and published in the Manhattan Mercury. K-State’s New Prairie Press will publish an accompanying open-access digital catalogue with new research on Parks and Kansas.