Celebrate the life and artistic legacy of Roy DeCarava…
C.S.’s father was an accomplished artist who was supremely and fiercely principled. Because of this he would eschew much of the acclaim that other less courageous artists would accept for themselves. DeCarava demanded that he be viewed as an artist, without qualification as an African American artist, or street artist, or a documentarian.
He took his camera everywhere he went. He lived and raised his family in Bed Stuy, but was born and raised uptown in Harlem. The art world tried to marginalize him because so many of his early subjects were the residents of the neighborhoods where he lived and worked. He knew that this made his subjects and his art no less great, even as the T.I.’s tried to say otherwise.
I’m proud to say that I was a fan of Roy DeCarava’s photographs decades before I had met him. In real life he was as compelling as the images he crafted. Speaking truth to power and expressing the beauty of it all, DeCarava is in a large part the inspiration for why I do what I do.
In memory of
ROY DeCARAVA
A celebration of the
life and work of
an American artist
Monday, May 10th at 6:30 PM
The Cooper Union Great Hall
7 East Seventh Street at Third Avenue
New York City
FREE and open to the public
You just put me up on something new, brother. That first photo, in particular, is awesome.
I think I’ll try to check out this show.
Not that I’m authority or Mr. DeCarava needs my co-sign BUT…
I suspect many DP. com readers don’t know his work, which like most things jazz, black, poetic and photographic is marginalized even by the standards of all those fields alone.
Roy DeCarava was a great GREAT artist; everyone who fucks with this site should get to their local library and take out or request inter-library loan of “The Sound I Saw”–
http://www.amazon.com/Sound-I-Saw-Roy-Decarava/dp/0714843318
Hopefully there are some posthumous collections in the works too.
DP– is there a Cooper Union link up yet we can pass the info along?
Willis,
You need a link other than this post?
Of course ** I ** don’t but some older, slower acquaintances of mine aren’t up to speed on the internets, plural… It’s like that time I showed “Draft Daze” to a lady documentarian, someone who could (and should) hook ICs up w/attention & she likes it but… she can see the boom mic in Sunset Park– like THAT’s everything.
Anyway, I’ll spread the word back to here & Cooper Union.
Willis,
Much appreciated and I will e-mail you with info for people who still don’t have the ‘S’ on their internet connection