Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985

Around a hundred and fifty works, over a hundred artists, and a thesis stated without hedging: self-representation is power. Deborah Willis and Philip Brookman built it for the National Gallery, it ran at the Getty through June, and its last stop is the Mississippi Museum of Art until November 8. Dawoud Bey, Kwame Brathwaite, Roy DeCarava, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Malick Sidibé, Jamel Shabazz, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson. The Jackson presentation is the reason to care about the last stop rather than the first: MMA partnered with Jackson State's Margaret Walker Center, which runs the COFO Learning Center, and hung rarely seen photographs from the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival with Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Sonia Sanchez and Nikki Giovanni in one room. Mississippi photographers Doris Derby and Roy Lewis are in the activism section with their own wall labels. A touring show usually loses something at each stop. This one arrived home and got heavier.