Chester Higgins's evanescent majesty, and paintings that pour onto the walls and floor.
The 79-year-old artist Chester Higgins, who was a staff photographer for The New York Times for many years, has said, "I make my images to bear witness to our presence, to the real and widespread accomplishments of people of African descent." But he does more than this. He finds and presents some moments of evanescent majesty when we are reaching toward epiphany.
This yearning is illustrated by "African American Pilgrims Dance in Honor of Ancient Spirits, Lake Nasser, Egypt" (2006). In it, dancers dressed all in white, seen in the blurry distance in a field awash in cyan tones, raise their hands upward. They look as if they are already partway across the threshold to the spirit realm.
The photographs in this show - more than 40 black-and-white and color images made throughout 70 years - mostly embody this sort of energy. Higgins's portrait "Abdul Drumming, Harlem" (1973) shows a drummer in a wrapped headdress and tunic of patterned cloth. His body is arced like a musical instrument in the midst of either driving the rhythm or being driven by it, or both.
In depicting this spirit, Higgins also captures something enduring about the African diasporic people, something indomitable. Take "Candomble Yao Initiate of Shun, Brooklyn" (2007), in which a man dressed in decorative finery seems like he could have struck much the same pose a century ago in Ghana.
Much like the drummer image, this photograph reads as if it exists along a continuum of time and space: the present moment and the past; New York City or places on the African continent, which is a way for Higgins to say that this spirit is undying.
