CDS > Exhibitions >
For the past four years Kerry Stuart Coppin, 50,
has made quietly gripping photographs of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean
and North America, from Little Haiti to Havana. He has also traveled to
West Africa to document links between her urban, Westernized cities and
the not-so-new world on this side of the Atlantic. It is his intention
to produce provocative photographic interpretations that elaborate and
celebrate positive aspects of Black community experience.
When North Americans think of Africa, particular images come to mind—rather
romantic images, with an overlay of antiquity; images of people wrapped
in traditional cloth, babies slung on backs. Or, a crisis particular to
one society—Somalia, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Zambia—rebounds
and becomes homogeneous for the region, perpetuating images of poverty,
famine, corruption, tribalism, and AIDS. Coppin believes that the arts
in general, and photography in particular, can play a role in the reinterpretation
and reconstruction of the history of Africa and Africans in the Diaspora;
that images of the African city can be used to investigate people’s
work and their view of themselves and their neighbors. Through these images,
Coppin asks us to consider the formation of a trans-Atlantic Black African
identity, encompassing North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa.
Black Men Learning to Fly / College
Park, Maryland / 1991
photo in banner on top: School of
Hard Knocks / Dakar, Senegal / 2001
Additional support provided by the North Carolina Arts Council, an agency
funded by the State of North Carolina and the National Endowment of the
Arts.
Gallery hours for both shows:
Monday–Thursday, 9 a.m.–7 p.m.
Friday, 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
Saturday, 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
Sunday, 1-5 p.m.
“When you’re young you are open to influences and you go to them. You go to museums. Then the street becomes your museum; the museum itself is bad for you. You don’t want your work to spring from art. You want it to commence from life.”—Walker Evans, 1971
On the 100th anniversary of the birth of Walker Evans, it is fitting that a small exhibition of his work is on view at the Center for Documentary Studies. The influence of Evans as a photographer is huge and celebrated. His influence as a teacher is less well known; yet that legacy is equally strong at Yale, where he taught for a decade, and at Duke. Like Evans, teachers at CDS direct students to the life of the streets in hopes they will bring back something authentic and meaningful for themselves, for the communities in which they work, and for the rest of us.
—Alex Harris
Evans was intrigued by any technology that might expand his vision. This exhibition is a digital translation of his work, made with respect and consideration for his own rendering of these images. Coupling digital files with ink jet printing opens the door to both brilliance and mischief. In the proper hands, it is a medium that gives greater clarity and subtlety to familiar pictures.—John T. Hill
Roadside Stand Near Birmingham, 1936
photo in banner on top: Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, 1936
Additional support for speakers provided by the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Duke University.