American Family: Derrick Adams and Deana Lawson

In American Family, Derrick Adams and Deana Lawson, the 2018 Gordon Parks Foundation Fellows, collectively explore how their familiar subjects can be elevated through the artists’ subjective and distinctive approaches and simultaneously define the complexity of the American character.  Adams and Lawson have both recognized Gordon Parks as an influence on their artistic practice. “Like Parks,” Lawson said, “my motivation is to give meaningful texture and complexity to images of global black culture.” Adams adds, “Parks’ influence…goes beyond the visual, into the meaning and purpose of why I feel it’s so important to show the many facets of Black American life in ways that shed light onto the complexity and richness of our past, present and future.”

Lawson envisions her photographic portraits of black persons as an “extended family” and an expression of “loving blackness,” in which black life is reclaimed by the visionary artist from negative forces and perceptions. In a recent interview appearing in the artist’s widely anticipated Aperture monograph Deana Lawson, she says, “I think about the capacity for human engagement, particularly in images and in pictures. I’m trying to conjure or direct the subject, in a way, to give me their full potential.”