Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For

Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For, on view at ArtCenter College of Design's Williamson Gallery

 

Exhibition Dates

Wednesday, April 17 through Saturday, August 17, 2024

 

In 1956, 18-year-old Kwame Brathwaite picked up a camera and began capturing images from the dimly lit jazz clubs that he frequented in the Bronx. For over six decades, the photographer would devote his career to perceptively documenting life and culture in conjunction with the Civil Rights, Black Arts and Black Power movements in images that have been hailed as elegant, powerful and visionary.

 

ArtCenter College of Design is proud to announce the exhibition Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For, on view April 17 through August 17, 2024. This major solo exhibition—the first in Southern California since Brathwaite’s death in April 2023, features approximately 50 of the artist’s color and black-and-white photographs from the 1960s through the 1970s.

 

While Brathwaite is best known for photographs that popularized the political slogan “Black is Beautiful” in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Things Well Worth Waiting For focuses on the late artist’s multifaceted relationship to music. Organized around three overlapping areas of his work: music, fashion and community, the exhibition features Brathwaite’s singular images of cultural luminaries such as Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye and Abbey Lincoln, alongside musicians, models and community members in the Bronx and Harlem. Together, these works shed light on a fascinating period in 20th-century culture.

 

The exhibition also serves as a reintroduction of a prescient artist whose work has become increasingly relevant in recent years. This groundbreaking solo exhibition represents the second major survey of works by Kwame Brathwaite in Los Angeles, arriving on the heels of the nationally traveling exhibition Black is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite and its accompanying publication, Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019).

 

Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For is guest curated by Grace Deveney from the Art Institute of Chicago, who, in explaining her decision to focus on Brathwaite’s “passion for music,” says, “[It] not only ignited his photography career and led to his writing music reviews for numerous international publications in the 1970s, addressing the distinct sounds of soul, R&B and funk, but his love of music also informed his pictures and his approach to photography.”

 

She states further, “Brathwaite has stated a lifelong desire to depict ‘the essence of Black experience, as a feeling, a drive, and an emotion’ that are heard and felt through music.” The exhibition title, named after the title of Brathwaite’s critical review of Stevie Wonder’s long anticipated album, Songs in the Key of Life (1976), reflects the artist’s hope and vision of a contemporary culture that embraces and celebrates Black identity.

 

In celebration of the “Black is Beautiful” movement, the exhibition includes photographs of the original Grandassa models: Clara Lewis, Black Rose, Nomsa Brath, Priscilla Bardonille, Mari Toussaint, Esther Davenport, Wanda Sims and Beatrice Cramston. While their settings, costumes and props vary, many were staged by Brathwaite in his studio located in Harlem adjacent to the Apollo Theater, and presented in the Naturally fashion and multimedia performances that continued at that legendary venue throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

 

Another facet of the exhibition is a large projection comprised of approximately 80 rotating color stills. Providing ambient sound is the inclusion of Swizz Beatz x Kwame Brathwaite, a double-disc vinyl record of jazz standards and contemporary jazz tracks curated by Swizz Beatz with cover artwork by Brathwaite.

 

In 1956, Brathwaite co-founded the African Jazz Art Society & Studio (AJASS) in the South Bronx, with the aim of celebrating jazz music as an African Art form by hosting jazz concerts. In 1962, a year after attending the “Miss Natural Standard of Beauty Contest,” AJASS staged Naturally ‘62: a groundbreaking merging of fashion, music and politics in Harlem that introduced the Grandassa Models—a group of black women who together challenged prevailing notions of beauty by wearing their hair in natural styles and showcasing African-inspired fashion and jewelry.

 

In the evening of January 28, 1962, the “Black is Beautiful” movement began. The name “Grandassa” came from Carlos A. Cooks, founder of the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement, who called Africa “Grandassaland.” Naturally events continued annually for many years, growing to be one of the most important cultural movements of the Twentieth Century. “Black is Beautiful” was promoted initially through the Naturally fashion shows with the Grandassa Models, and spread through nationally traveling AJASS concerts by members Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and others. Today, the phrase is synonymous with the work of Brathwaite, whose photographs celebrate black culture and identity yet also stand alone as unique and stunning images unto themselves.

 

April 17, 2024