The Beach Museum of Art is pleased to announce the launch of the exhibition catalog/ebook “Gordon Parks: Homeward to the Prairie I Come.” The New Prairie Press, Kansas State University’s open access digital press, recently published the exhibition catalog/ebook. It was edited by museum curator Aileen June Wang and features new scholarship about Gordon Parks and his activities in Kansas in the late part of his career. Compiled by members of the K-State Gordon Parks Project, the volume was a collaboration between the university’s department of English and the Beach Museum of Art. The project highlights a past gallery exhibition at the Beach and a current virtual exhibition of photographs gifted by Gordon Parks to K-State. The collection was organized by the Beach Museum of Art, and a digital archive was created by K-State English department with materials and oral histories related to Parks’s film “The Learning Tree.” The collaboration was made possible with major support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and additional support from the Gordon Parks Foundation. The exhibition catalog/ebook increases awareness and understanding of Gordon Parks’ artistic practice through photography, poetry, literature, and film. Renowned African American photography scholar and artist Deborah Willis writes that the book “adds wonderfully to [knowledge about] Gordon Parks’ life as it introduces new questions, specifically about sexual abuse in the Learning Tree and the ‘underdiscussed’ activities of Parks’ life.” She adds: “I believe it will have an impact on the genres of memoir, migration, biography, and film studies.”
Summer is here. Now is the perfect time to visit the Beach Museum and take in “Prairie Views”. Nothing compares to the expansive beauty of the Kansas landscape. From sunrise to storms, this exhibition features a selection of works that celebrate the prairie in all its splendor. The show is free and open to the public and is on view now through December 15, 2022, in the Mary Holton Seaton Gallery East.