“I try to reflect on the positive aspects of my community and to see the relationship between various communities of color. My work reflects a black aesthetic but tries to speak to everyone.”
- Shawn W, Walker
Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to present Shawn Walker: Lost & Found, an exhibition of rediscovered early exhibition prints by one of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop. These extraordinary photographs, created in the first decade of the artist’s sixty-year career, depict and immortalize members of the artist’s community who were all too often overlooked and unseen, serving as a window into the origins of the artist’s creative practice. Having rested dormant, safely stored, and forgotten in The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture archives for over a half-century and now reunited with the artist, many of the photographs exhibited in Lost and Found are being shown in public for the very first time. They are some of the few early prints still in the artist’s possession after his archive of over 100,000 images was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2019 in what would become the first photography archive of a black artist procured by the institution.
