Chester Higgins in Conversation with Diana McClure

Join us for a timely and engaging conversation bringing together photographer Chester Higgins and writer and artist Diana McClure to reflect on photography, history, and the living inheritance of the African diaspora. Held at the close of the exhibition, Shared Memories, and in proximity to Juneteenth, they will consider themes of memory, identity, and cultural continuity that define Higgins’s work and resonate across McClure’s writing and image-based practice.

Chester Higgins: Shared Memories runs through June 20th at Bruce Silverstein Gallery.

Diana McClure is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York with a focus on environmental culture. She holds degrees in history from Columbia University and in sociology from the New School for Social Research, where she first incorporated photography into a text-and-image-based practice. Her art writing has appeared in important art publications including Jamel Shabazz’s Drama & Flava (2025) and monographs for photobook publisher Kris Graves Projects. Her photographs are in the Public Collections of The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture. McClure has also taught in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts under the leadership of artist and photography scholar Dr. Deborah Willis.

Chester Higgins is a photographer whose work spans more than five decades, exploring the cultural, spiritual, and historical dimensions of the African diaspora. Born in Alabama and shaped by the Civil Rights era, his practice has taken him across the United States, Africa, and the broader diaspora, creating a sustained visual record grounded in dignity and lived experience. Alongside his independent work, he served for nearly forty years as a staff photographer for The New York Times, contributing to a broader redefinition of how Black life is represented in the public sphere.
Higgins's photographs are held in major museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Virginia Museum of Fine Art. In 2022, he was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame, in recognition of his lasting impact.

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Host or Publisher Bruce Silverstein Gallery