Dorothy M. Davis unveils Langston Hughes and Griffith J. Davis’s 20-year friendship. Through personal letters and photographs, Davis will provide rare insights into how their bond inspired new horizons for Langston Hughes in Africa and Griff Davis as an internationally recognized pioneer photographer, journalist, and U.S. Senior Foreign Service Officer. 

Dorothy M. Davis, President of Griffith J. Davis Photographs and Archives, has unearthed, researched, managed, preserved and promoted her father’s legacy as an internationally renowned pioneer photographer, journalist and Senior U.S. Foreign Service Officer since he died in July 1993.  Starting as the Executor of his Estate, Ms. Davis is the primary source and contextual authority on his kaleidoscopic life.

Growing up in an African American U.S. Foreign Service family, Dorothy M. Davis has followed her father’s footsteps as a pioneer in the area of international development communications. Born in Liberia and raised in Tunisia, Nigeria, Switzerland, and the U.S.A., Ms. Davis has a unique career path that thrives at the nexus of private, public and non-profit sectors. The range of clients of her parallel company, Dorothy M. Davis Strategic Global Consulting, include: the United Nations system, Congressional Black Caucus Institute-Global African Diaspora Initiative (CBCI-GADI), Prosper Africa, The Andrew J. Young Foundation, and the Africa America Institute. 

Griff Davis’ photographs are permanently installed at the Museum of Broadway in Times Square, New York City; the U.S. Supreme Court Archives at the request of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; the U.S. Embassy/Monrovia at the request of then-U.S. Ambassador to Liberia Linda Thomas-Greenfield; and Spike Lee’s collection of historical photos.

Exhibitions and documentaries include: The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York; the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, California; PBS-WEDU-TV Arts Plus segment “Griffith Davis” in Florida (August 2023); PBS American Experience “The American Diplomat” (February 2022); “Les Rencontres d’Arles International Photography Festival” in France (Summer 2021); The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University in Toronto, Canada.

Ms. Davis’ article, Through His Lens: The Legacy of Pioneering U.S. Foreign Service Officer Griff Davis, appears in the October 2024 issue of the Foreign Service Journal. For more information: www.griffdavis.com.

Join Dr. Cheryl Finley for an insightful talk exploring the Harlem Renaissance and Langston Hughes’ profound influence on shaping the movement’s artistic and cultural legacy. Discover how Hughes’ poetry, vision and voice helped define an era of artistic expression and Black identity. 

Cheryl Finley, Ph.D., is the Walton Endowed Professor and Director of the Atlanta University Center Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective in the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. Committed to engaging strategic partners to transform the arts and culture industry, she leads an innovative undergraduate program at the world’s largest historically Black college and university consortium in preparing the next generation of African American museum and visual arts leaders.

A curator and contemporary art critic, Dr. Finley is retired from Cornell University, where she was a tenured professor of Art History for more than 20 years. She is an award-winning author noted for Committed to Memory: The Art of the Slave Ship Icon (Princeton University Press, 2018), the first in-depth study of the most famous image associated with the memory of slavery—a schematic engraving of a packed slave ship hold—and the art, architecture, poetry, and film it has inspired since its creation in Britain in 1788. Her co-authored publications of note include My Soul Has Grown Deep: Black Art from the American South (Yale University Press, 2018), Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story (Carnegie Museum of Art, 2011), and Diaspora, Memory, Place: David Hammons, Maria Magdalena Campos- Pons, Pamela Z (Prestel, 2008). A frequent essayist, Dr. Finley’s writing has appeared in numerous academic and popular publications, including Art Forum, Aperture, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, American Quarterly, and Small Axe. She serves on the Boards of Creative Capital, the Menil Foundation, Circuit Arts and Island Grown Initiative. She has written extensively on the Harlem Renaissance including artists Lois Mailou Jones and James VanDerZee.

Dr. Finley’s current book project, Black Art Futures, is a social art history of the global Black arts ecosystem, focusing on the relationships among artists, patrons, curators, museums, galleries, art and activism. Her current exhibition, ‘Free as they want to be:’ Artists Committed to Memory, is co-curated with Dr. Deborah Willis. It will be on view at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center until June 30, 2025, and travel to Cornell University’s Johnson Museum in fall 2025.

Photo by Gediyon Kifle

Radley Davis (Iss Awi/Pit River) introduces the traditional cultures of the Pit River People of present-day Shasta, Siskiyou, Modoc, and Lassen Counties in Northern California. Davis will share stories of the connection to ancestral lands and ongoing efforts to preserve language and customs. 

Nevada has been the source of some of the best fossils and fossil hunting in the United States, particularly for those in search of ichthyosaurs, giant aquatic reptiles from the Triassic.  One of the earliest collectors to explore these riches was Annie Montague Alexander, a petit, soft-spoken woman with a passion for paleontology specifically and for field work in general. Barbara Stein, author of On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West, explores Annie Alexander and her contributions to paleontology and vertebrate zoology.  

About Barbara Stein: 

Barbara Stein was a staff curator and researcher in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology from 1985-2000, the first museum of two natural history museums founded by Annie Montague Alexander on the UC Berkeley campus.  A symposium in 1994 on women who had made important contributions to the University became the impetus for writing, On Her Own Terms: Annie Montague Alexander and the Rise of Science in the American West.

Dorothea Lange was hired by the federal government in 1942 to document Japanese Americans as they were exiled from their homes on the West Coast and confined in detention camps. Her images of the exiles’ humanity offered a powerful critique of the incarceration program, to the point that her photographs were confiscated and censored for the duration of the war. In this talk, Meredith Oda explores Lange’s images to better understand her perspective and the experiences of the Japanese Americans forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated without charge.

About Meredith Oda:

Meredith Oda is Grace A. Griffin Associate Professor in American History in the Department of History at the University of Nevada, Reno. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago, her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her first book, The Gateway to the Pacific: Japanese Americans and the Remaking of San Francisco (Chicago 2019) was a transpacific urban history of redevelopment in the city. She has also published scholarly articles as well as non-academic pieces in TIME magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Nevada Humanities’ Double Down, and other popular outlets. Currently, she is working on a second book, People in Motion: Japanese American Incarceration and Resettlement during World War II, that explores the lives Japanese Americans remade as they left the detention centers.

Philip Brookman, Consulting Curator in the Department of Photographs at the National Gallery of Art, explores Lange’s work and the creation of the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Seeing People.  

Presented as part of the Debra and Dennis Scholl Distinguished Speaker Series 

Highlighting the profound significance of Native American poetry and its importance within the broader context of American literature, celebrate National Poetry Month with celebrated Native American poets, Nizhoni Widehat and Nila Northsun, in a conversation moderated by Stacey Montooth, Executive Director of the Nevada Department of Native American Affairs.  

Free for Tribal Community Members.

Meet Judith Lowry and exhibition co-curators Melissa Melero-Moose (Fallon Paiute | Modoc) and Ann M. Wolfe, the Museum’s Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director, in the gallery for a closing conversation and walkthrough. 

Free with Admission. 

Join legendary broadcaster Peggy Berryhill (Muscogee), the “First Lady of Native Radio,” as she sits down with acclaimed artist Judith Lowry (Mountain Maidu | Pit River | Washoe) for a conversation about the transformative power of storytelling. Drawing from their rich experiences in media and art, they will explore how stories shape identity, preserve cultural heritage, and connect communities across generations. 

Free to Tribal Communities.

Photo by Seve Cardosi