Before Reno: Langston Hughes Blends Politics and Art
Before moving to Reno, Langston Hughes became deeply involved in the arts and politics of San Francisco and Carmel-by-the-Sea. He supported the Scottsboro Boys trial by organizing a celebrity auction in San Francisco and participated in the 1933 California strikes. His activism led to an unproduced play and threats that forced him to leave Carmel. Seeking safety, he went to Reno in September 1934, as described in his unpublished essay “The Vigilantes Knocked at My Door.”
In Reno, Hughes developed a new artistic perspective shaped by his experiences in the American West, contrasting the region’s promise with the severe poverty he encountered. Traveling through the South and California, and experiencing homelessness firsthand, he created two of his most powerful stories, “Slice ‘Em Down” and “On the Road.” Join Alex Albright as he retraces Hughes’s steps through the Biggest Little City and beyond.
Photo by Jan Wunsch
My Friend, Langston!
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.
The Pulse of a Cultural Revolution: The Harlem Renaissance and Hughes
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.
Presented as part of the Debra and Dennis Scholl Distinguished Speaker Series
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 open at the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center on February 25, 2025 and travel to Cornell University’s Johnson Museum in fall 2025.
Photo by Gediyon Kifle
Radley Davis: Pit River Cultural Traditions
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.
Annie Montague Alexander: Fossils and Field Work
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.
Through Lange’s Lens: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans
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.
Dorothea Lange: Circa 1952
1952 was a landmark moment for Dorothea Lange, and a turning point in the history of photography. From her insider’s perspective, Sarah Meister, Executive Director of Aperture, will weave together stories about Lange, MoMA, Aperture, and the unruly medium of photography they were all seeking to understand.
Presented as part of the Debra and Dennis Scholl Distinguished Speaker Series
Photo by Naima Green
About Sarah Meister:
Sarah Meister is Executive Director of Aperture, a nonprofit publisher founded in 1952 by a group of artists and writers (including Dorothea Lange). Sarah joined Aperture following more than twenty-five years in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she curated numerous acclaimed exhibitions including Fotoclubismo: Brazilian Modernist Photography (2021); Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (2020) and Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction (cocurator, 2017). Her publications have considered Gordon Parks (2020) Frances Benjamin Johnston (2019), the 1967 MoMA exhibition New Documents (2017), Josef Albers (2016), Horacio Coppola and Grete Stern (coauthor, 2015), Bill Brandt (2013), and many more. She was the inaugural instructor for the online course Seeing Through Photographs, and co-director of the August Sander Project, five-year research initiative at MoMA/Columbia University. Sarah is the curator of Carrie Mae Weems: The Heart of the Matter, which will open at the Gallerie d’Italia in Turin in April 2025, accompanied by an Aperture publication.
Philip Brookman on Dorothea Lange: Seeing People
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
Women in Native American Poetry
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 in a conversation moderated by Stacey Montooth, Executive Director of the Nevada Department of Native American Affairs.
Free for Tribal Community Members.
Image:
Judith Lowry
The Race for Fire, 2001
Collection of the Maidu Museum
and Historic Site, Roseville, CA
Artist and Curator Meet and Greet
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.
Image:
Frank LaPena (Nomtipom-Wintu)
Insects and Other Beings, 2008