The former banking hall of the New York Life Insurance Company building in Tribeca has been reborn as a sleek exhibition space for Jack Shainman Gallery. A marble bank vault—still anchored beneath Corinthian columns—creates a dramatic backdrop for the latest photography retrospective dedicated to Gordon Parks, the legendary chronicler of the Civil Rights era.
Since 2018, Shainman has partnered with the Gordon Parks Foundation to showcase the photographer’s work. After four solo shows in his Chelsea locations, the gallerist felt the need to reinvent the format. “With Gordon, every time that I do it, I like to do it differently,” he explained, stressing his desire to keep each presentation fresh and unexpected.
A historic venue for a fresh look at Gordon Parks
The gallery’s setting is more than a backdrop; it is a character in its own right. The marble vault, a relic from the 19th-century banking era, frames the photographs with a sense of permanence that echoes Parks’s timeless visual narratives. Visitors wander past towering columns and wainscoting, encountering images that span from the intimate streets of Mobile, Alabama in 1956 to the sweeping crowds of the 1963 March on Washington.
Highlighted works include “Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956,” a candid glimpse of post-war commerce, and “Boy with June Bug, Fort Scott, Kansas, 1963,” which captures a quiet moment of childhood wonder. The exhibit also displays an iconic portrait of Ingrid Bergman on the volcanic island of Stromboli, taken in 1949 during her controversial partnership with director Roberto Rossellini.
Collaborative voices shape the narrative
For this fifth installment, Shainman invited a lineup of luminaries who either worked with Parks, knew him personally, or were profoundly inspired by his oeuvre. Ava DuVernay, director of the 2000 documentary Half Past Autumn, contributed an essay that contextualizes Parks’s impact on modern visual storytelling. Lonnie Ali, the widow of Muhammad Ali, and Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, offered personal reflections that bridge the photographer’s historic subjects with contemporary legacies.
Anderson Cooper also penned a remembrance, a choice that goes beyond his reputation as an art collector. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, shared a decades-long, open relationship with Parks, a detail Cooper acknowledges with admiration: “He’s really cool with it, because he says how Gordon was such a ladies’ man.” Cooper’s contribution underscores the intertwined personal and artistic worlds that Parks navigated.
Iconic images and their modern resonance
The collection does more than revisit history; it illuminates the way Parks continues to inspire today’s creators. Young photographer Tyler Mitchell cites Parks’s street scenes as a catalyst for his own work, while rapper Kendrick Lamar based an entire music video on the photographer’s black-American narratives.
Isabella Rossellini, daughter of Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini, provided a reflective note on the Stromboli portrait: “Gordon Parks’s photos of my parents were not affected by the gossip and scandal that swelled around them… With one photo alone he could capture the whole intent of their film Stromboli, that is, the cultural clashes that ravaged Italy after World War II.” Her words highlight Parks’s uncanny ability to condense complex social realities into single frames.
Other striking pieces include a photograph of Whoopi Goldberg on the set of The Color Purple (Anson County, North Carolina, 1985) and a series of candid moments from the 1963 Washington, D.C., march. Together, they compose a mosaic that not only honors Parks’s legacy but also invites new generations to explore the power of visual storytelling.
The exhibition runs through the first week of November, inviting visitors to step inside a space where history, architecture, and art converge, offering a renewed perspective on a photographer whose images remain as resonant today as ever.
