YONKERS, NEW YORK.- The Hudson River Museum presents "Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks," on view through September 1, 2002. This is the first complete retrospective exhibition of the works of renowned American artist Gordon Parks. Parks is an American Renaissance man who has mastered many media to express an uplifting and influential message of hope in the face of adversity. This exhibition is organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and co-curated by Philip Brookman, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran, and Deborah Willis, collections coordinator at the Center for African-American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution. Although the 87 year-old Parks is best known as a photojournalist, this retrospective brings together for the first time his photographs with his works as a filmmaker, novelist, poet and musician. Half Past Autumn: The Art of Gordon Parks begins in the present with several of his most recent images and then, like a cinematic flashback, propels visitors into the past through Parks’s early photographs of Kansas that represent his childhood.

 

The exhibition features 219 photographs, with significant works from each of Parks’s major series from 1940 through 1997, combined with his books, music, film and poetry. The result is, in the artist’s words, a "tone-poem" that impressionistically tells his own story. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas in 1912, Gordon Parks was the youngest of 15 children. After his mother died when he was 16, Parks left Kansas for Minneapolis and supported himself by working as a piano player, busboy, basketball player and Civilian Conservation Corpsman. At the age of 25, Parks began to seriously consider photography. While working as a waiter on the Northern Pacific Railroad, he read voraciously, wrote music and through reading the magazines of the day, was introduced to pictures made by social documentary photographers for Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) Historical Section. The photographers he studied were Ben Shahn, Jack Delano, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange, John Vachon, and Walker Evans. "They were photographing poverty, and I knew poverty so well," Parks recalls.