Films

The Learning Tree

Part of Film Legacies of the Black Arts Movement
  • This event is canceled.
  • East Building

    East Building Large Auditorium

Still from Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree, courtesy of Park Circus

Still from Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree, courtesy of Park Circus

Canceled

Join us for an in-person introduction by Philip Brookman, curator of the exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985

A coming-of-age story by artist Gordon Parks, The Learning Tree was the first production by a major Hollywood studio (Warner Brothers) to be directed by an African American filmmaker.

Parks’s feature film debut is based on his 1963 semi-autobiographical novel of the same name about a teenager growing up in rural Kansas during the 1920s. Parks not only wrote the screenplay adaptation of his own novel and directed the film, but he also produced it and composed the musical score. The Learning Tree was included in the National Film Registry by the United States National Film Preservation Board in 1989. (1969, 35mm, 106 minutes)

Programmed in conjunction with the exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement: 1955-1985, open from September 21, 2025 to January 11, 2026.

 

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Two people look out of side-by-side windows in a brick building in this horizontal black and white photograph. The woman on our left has a double chin and a broad chest. She wears a polka-dotted dress and dark shawl or vest, and she leans forward with one hand on the sill. Her face is partially shadowed by a white window blind. An American flag hanging near this window billows across the right two-thirds of the picture, entirely hiding the second person’s head. That person wears a coat buttoned up to a rounded collar. They hold one hand near their chin and the other by their waist. The flag has eight columns of stars. The work is signed and dated in the white margin below: “1955 HOBOKEN” to the left and “Robert Frank” to the right.

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