Artist Portrait Series

THE ARTIST PORTRAIT SERIES

Fern Logan with some of the portraits of African-American artists that appear in her new book, The Artist Portrait Series. In the mid-1980s, Fern Logan began taking photographs of contemporary black visual artists in their work environment. Now the public can see them as she did.

Logan, an assistant professor of photography at SIUC, has assembled 61 portraits, along with her memories of each photo shoot, in her new book, The Artist Portrait Series: Images of Contemporary African American Artists (Southern Illinois University Press, 2001).

It’s an antidote to an art world that has long ignored blacks, Logan says.

Asked to curate an exhibition of African-American artists in the early 1980s, she realized she didn’t know any. "That disturbed me," she says.

Research and networking led her to scores of gifted black painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers, jewelry makers, and others. Most labored with little recognition in New York City, and several of them were getting on in years.

Her portraits reveal some celebrities—Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks, author Maya Angelou, choreographer Alvin Ailey—and many other leading artists, such as collagist Romare Bearden, the late painter Jacob Lawrence, and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett.

The photographs will be exhibited for the first time in their entirety in July 2001 at the Jamaica Art Center’s museum in Queens, N.Y.

--Paula Davenport, Media & Communication Resources

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