A Language We Share: Beverly Price and Gordon Parks

On March [6/20], 2026, the Center for Art and Advocacy will open a two-person exhibition featuring works by Gordon Parks and Beverly Price. Price is a 2023 recipient of the Center’s fellowship.

At the core of the exhibition are images of children; sometimes tender and playful, at other moments positioned as advocates for the future in which they hope to come of age. Together, these works remind us that the struggle for civil rights is enacted interpersonally, and that joy and play persist not only as necessary antidotes to oppression but also as embodied examples of a just world.

During her incarceration, Beverly Price could see Anacostia Park in Washington, D.C. from her window. Upon returning home, she began photographing in that same park, focusing on Black children at play. Her impulse was to preserve and protect a version of childhood that is so often taken from children growing up in hyper-violent and over-policed communities. In doing so, she manifests the protection she wishes she had been afforded in her own childhood. Remarkably, Parks photographed this same site in 1942; his iconic image from the series, Anacostia, D.C. Frederick Douglass Housing Project: A Dance Group (1942), will be on view.

Gordon Parks’ images, timeless yet instantly identifiable as documents of the decades in which they were made, serve as a clear blueprint for Beverly Price’s practice. For both artists, image-making is a means of publishing a first draft of history.

For Price, “This collaboration is not one of imitation, but of continuation. Placing our work together affirms that I am working within a lineage Gordon Parks helped establish, using photography as a tool for dignity, truth, and social responsibility, while speaking from my own lived experience, my community, and my spiritual assignment. Gordon Parks cleared the path. I continue forward, guided by what he left behind while carrying my own questions, my own community, and my own responsibility.”

Meaningfully, this exhibition takes place on the occasion of two significant anniversaries: the 20th anniversary of Parks’s death and the 20-year anniversary of Beverly Price’s return home from incarceration, both in 2006.

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Host or Publisher Center for Art and Advocacy