BAIA Talks :
Interview with Photographer Adger Cowans
This weekend in attendance of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art’s debut of Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Najee Dorsey sits down with renowned legacy photographer and expressionist painter Adger Cowans and discuss photography, art & politics, and “black aesthetic”.
(part A)
(Part B)
Adger Cowans, a fine arts photographer and abstract expressionist painter has experimented with a myriad of mediums over his artistic career. Renowned in the world of photography and fine art, his works have been shown by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Museum of Photography, Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Harvard Fine Art Museum, Detroit Art Institue, James E. Lewis Museum and numerous other art institutions.
Adger attended Ohio University where he received a BFA in photography. He furthered his education at the School of Motion Picture Arts and School of Visual Arts in New York. While serving in the United States Navy, he worked as a photographer before moving to New York, where he later worked with Life magazine photographer, Gordon Parks and fashion photographer, Henri Clarke.
Adger Cowans was awarded the Lorenzo il Magnifico alla Carriera in recognition of a Distinguished Career at the 2001 Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art. He is the recipient of a John Hay Whitney Fellowship and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Caesar Chavez, Rosa Parks Visiting Scholars Award, Wayne State University.
At his first one man show at the Heliography Gallery in New York, Jacob Deschin of the New York Times described Cowans’ work as “Boldly inventive and experimental…and the artist is a craftsman to his fingertips.”
Major exhibitions have included: “Committed to the Image” at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, “A History of African American Photographers”
(A short excerpt from the Conversation)
