The Getty in Los Angeles is showing 150 works that trace the Black Arts Movement across three decades, from 1955 to 1985. The exhibition, Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985, was curated by Philip Brookman of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and Deborah Willis, historian, curator and professor at NYU. It stays on view in Los Angeles until mid-June, then moves to the Mississippi Museum of Art from July 25 to November 8, 2026.

More than 100 artists and activists appear in the show. The list spans Gordon Parks, Ernest C. Withers, Moneta Sleet Jr., Ming Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Harry Adams, Ray Francis, John W. Mosley and David Clyde Driskell. Some works were made as art. Others were not. Several were produced simply to support political organizing.

The takeaway: this is a survey that treats photographs as agents of history, not as its residue.

What does the exhibition actually contain?

The range is deliberately wide. Withers is represented by I Am a Man, Sanitation Workers Strike, Memphis, Tennessee, dated March 28, 1968. Sleet's Two Teenaged Supporters of the Selma March, from 1965, comes from the Saint Louis Art Museum as a gift of the Johnson Publishing Company. Adams's Protest Car (1962) is held at the Tom and Ethel Bradley Center at California State University, Northridge. Weems's Mom at Work (1978–1984) and Parks's portrait of Ethel Sharrieff in Chicago (1963) sit alongside Driskell's Woman with Flowers (1972), an oil and collage on canvas.

Video enters the installation too. Barbara McCullough's Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflections on Ritual Space (1980), a sixty-minute work featuring David Hammons, Betye Saar and N'Nengudi N'Senga among others, expands the show beyond still images. Work by African, British, Nuyorican and Caribbean artists runs through the hang, and the exhibition includes many collage pieces. It is, in the curators' framing, itself a kind of collage.

The takeaway: iconic images and unfamiliar ones share the walls, and the unfamiliar material carries real weight.

Why does the Getty say the timing matters?

Mazie Harris, assistant curator at the Getty, anchors the show in one photograph. It is Darryl Cowherd's The Time is Now, made in the 1960s, showing that phrase graffitied onto a door. Visitors see it as they enter. "The time is now to appreciate these generations of artists," Harris said. "The time is now to acknowledge the impact of their important work and to recognize its ongoing relevance in our fraught times."

Harris draws a direct line between mid-century publishing and the present. "The images of those decades were consequential because they were reproduced in magazines and newspapers that reached large audiences," she said. "The opportunity for seeing and sharing is even greater today, but—now as then—cutting through the noise of mainstream media to capture widespread attention requires powerful visions and strong voices."

The takeaway: the curators argue the medium's political force has not diminished, even if the distribution channels have changed.

How was the show built?

Willis and Brookman began work many years ago on one assumption: photographers and photographic images were central to advancing Black art and culture. They looked at how photography redefined the way Black life was visualized and understood. The selection process started with key images and key figures. Voting rights advocate Fannie Lou Hamer is one name the organizers wanted to mark. Some photographers entered the show for spotlighting Black beauty. Others entered for documenting the Black community. Images of the period's racial violence are present, but the overall emphasis falls on Black self-fashioning and storytelling.

Ming Smith's Sun Ra Space II, New York, New York (1978) holds a prominent place. Harris describes an immersive image in which Sun Ra appears to float toward the viewer, radiating light, with a constellation swirling behind him. An extended exposure, she notes, gives form to the musician's liberatory futurism.

The takeaway: the curatorial method privileges roles over names, showing what photography did rather than only who made it.

The exhibition's larger claim is simple. Photographs do not merely record social transformation; they sway opinion, focus attention and spur solidarity. After Los Angeles, Jackson, Mississippi will host the show through the first week of November 2026.