Adger Cowans American, b. 1936

Adger Cowans (b. 1936) is an American photographer and painter born in Columbus, Ohio, whose career spans more than six decades. His body of work includes powerful black-and-white photography as well as abstract and experimental painting, and through his oeuvre, Cowans has established himself as a pioneering figure in the history of Black visual art. Known for his sharp eye for light and composition, Cowans honed his skills working with Gordon Parks at LIFE magazine and having a career as a film still photographer on more than thirty Hollywood productions with directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Spike Lee. Prior to being the first Black film still photographer in Hollywood, Cowans was one of the first Black students at Ohio University to graduate with a degree in photography, which he did in 1958, before going on to train at the School of Motion Picture Arts and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Early in his career, Cowans pioneered a distinctive approach to mark making in his painting, employing combs, sticks, serrated edges, electric drills, found objects, perforated screens, and even the patterned surfaces of crystal to apply, transfer from, and manipulate paint. These experimental techniques, used to scrape, push, fling, and layer pigment, resulted in abstract compositions of remarkable depth and complexity. Rather than using paint to render images, Cowans treated the paint itself as the subject: a material to be sculpted, moved, and illuminated. This approach, developed early and independently, quietly resonated within the work of other artists, such as his friends Ed Clark and Jack Whitten, who would later adopt similar tools and techniques. Cowans’ pioneering vision remains uniquely his own.

In 1963, Cowans became a founding member of the Kamoinge Workshop, a collective of Black photographers including, among others, Louis Draper and Roy DeCarava, committed to portraying Black life with dignity and depth. The community thrives today, and in 2020 The Whitney and The Getty museums held Working Together: The Photographers of The Kamoinge Workshop, a retrospective celebrating the group. Cowans is currently the president of Kamoinge Workshop. Similarly, in 1978, Cowans joined the AfriCOBRA collective, who worked to foster and promote paintings of the Black aesthetic.

Cowans work has been published in a number of magazines including Essence, Ebony, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Life, Time, and Modern Photography and has been exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Studio Museum of Harlem, Cleveland Museum of Art, and Harvard Art Museums, among others. He has taught photography at Wayne State University, the University of Michigan, and the Cleveland Institute of Arts. Today, he continues his photography and painting from his studio in Connecticut.