Adger Cowans, an African-American photographer and painter born in 1936, combines artistic research and political engagement between New York, the Kamoinge Workshop, and AfriCOBRA. His works, dedicated to the dialogue between light, matter, and identity, are presented at Art Basel Miami Beach 2025 by the refined Bruce Silverstein gallery, celebrating his long career and influence on the art world.
“Look, people can never know the artist. The artist is in his work. That's where you find him, if you want to find him.” Adger Cowans says it without emphasis, as if it were obvious. But there's a tension in those words: the idea that the artist is never still, never definitive. That he changes, that he grows. And that each work is only a snapshot of that transformation.
Cowans was born in Columbus , Ohio , in 1936. As a child, he studied trumpet, with such discipline that he earned a full scholarship to Capital University . Music seemed to open the way for him, but photography came from the side, insistent. It grabbed him, pushed him elsewhere. So he abandoned the trumpet and became one of the first African-American students to graduate in photography at Ohio University , where he met Clarence H. White Jr. and discovered the grammar of American masters Adams , Weston , Stieglitz , and Strand . A language made of rigor, light, and structure. «When I started, photography was not an art» , he reveals, «it was a profession» .
After graduation, he moved to New York . He attended the School of Motion Picture Arts and the School of Visual Arts . It was the beginning of a journey that would lead him to work in different contexts, always with the same attention to light. But first, an experience came that would shape his identity: he enlisted in the Navy , following a family tradition that stretched from his great-great-grandfather , Buffalo Soldier, to his cousin, the Tuskegee Pilot . There, too, he photographed, observed, and recorded.
In 1958 , the meeting that changed his life took place: Gordon Parks invited him to work at Life magazine . Parks didn't teach him photography—Cowans already knew how to do that—but he instilled in him a moral stance: transforming negative energy, using photography as a tool against violence and racism, and understanding that the gaze is a responsibility. "When you get out of school, call me ," Parks told him, and Cowans understood that art is never neutral: it is commitment, choice, dialogue with the world.
In the early 1960s , New York was a bustling laboratory. "I had to do something with my hands ," he confessed, "I wanted to touch color ." And it was in this climate that the Kamoinge Workshop was born , a collective of black photographers who decided to tell their story, unfiltered. Cowans was among the founders. With him were Roy DeCarava , Anthony Barboza , Louis Draper , and Ming Smith . "Kamoinge means 'working together' in Kikuyu ." And that's exactly what they did: they shared techniques, perspectives, and stories. They built an autonomous and profound representation of black communities, becoming a central voice of the Black Arts Movement .
