Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco is pleased to announce Humanity Today, a group exhibition on display from February 2 through March 11, 2017. The exhibition highlights current tensions surrounding civil rights around the world that are reminiscent of past conditions such as Anti-Apartheid, the U.S. Civil Rights movement and the U.S.’s isolation of Cuba. The exhibition presents a perspective on these pivotal periods in history, featuring works by Sadie Barnette Victor Ehikhamenor, Aida Muluneh, Carlos Javier Ortiz, Blessing Ngobeni, Gordon Parks, and Lissette Solórzano. The artists of Humanity Today focus on moving towards equality for all.
On August 23, 1963, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom convened on the National Mall, the largest unified action for human and economic rights that had ever taken place in the United States. On the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech, enjoining the nation to put an end to discrimination and intolerance. Gordon Parks (b. Fort Scott, KS, 1912-2006) captured the historic event for LIFE magazine, as seen in the photograph Untitled, Washington, D.C., 1963. Today, millions of people are assembling again at the National Mall in Washington D.C., fighting to secure the same rights won all those years ago; American citizens engaging in the conversation of how Civil Rights can not only be upheld, but pushed further towards a more equal and just society. The faces present in Parks’ Black Muslim Rally, Harlem, New York (1963), are still present today in the streets, in the spirit of the protests blazing trails toward the same vision. Parks’ empathy and charisma, captured in his photography, bridges the chasm of time, echoing contemporary needs for righteous political action.
