Melanee C. Harvey, assistant professor, department of art, Howard University; Kellie Jones, professor, department of art history and archaeology, and faculty fellow, Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS), Columbia University; Richard J. Powell, John Spencer Bassett Professor of Art and Art History, Duke University, and Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; Laura Wexler, professor of American studies, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and film and media studies, affiliate faculty in ethnicity, race, and migration, co-chair, Women’s Faculty Forum, director, The Photographic Memory Workshop, and primary investigator, The Photogrammar Project, Yale University; moderated by Anjuli Lebowitz, exhibition research associate, department of photographs, National Gallery of Art

Throughout his career, Gordon Parks explored many issues, including segregation, feminism, and nationhood, through writing, photography, and film. Much of Parks’s early photographic output came through his affiliation with government programs like the Works Progress Administration and the Office of War Information. At the John Wilmerding Symposium on American Art, “American Communities, Then and Now,” held on February 8, 2019, art historians Melanee C. Harvey, Kellie Jones, Richard J. Powell, and Laura Wexler discuss Parks’s work for the government and how his photographs participated in a larger social conversation. This panel discussion is moderated by Anjuli Lebowitz.