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the gibbes museum of art

Joshua Parks

October 28, 2024 - December 8, 2024

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Open Studio Hours 

Tuesday, Wednesday 10am-2pm | Thursday 10am-12pm

Joshua Parks is a Black cultural worker who uses filmmaking, photography and archivism to analyze urban and rural communities in the Black Belt South, their relationship to land and water as the basis of subsistence, autonomy, survival, and collective memory, and how these elements influence cultural and spiritual development. He was raised in Jacksonville, Florida, but his roots stretch from the Lowcountry of South Carolina to the interior of Georgia, down to the Gulf Coast of Florida and Alabama. 

Joshua was the principal photographer for the Greenbook of South Carolina (2022), and has photos exhibited at the International African American Museum, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, the Gullah Geechee Heritage Corridor, the Seashore Farmers’ Lodge Museum and Cultural Center, and the Farrette House.

He formerly served as an in-house producer for the International African American Museum, contributing to their core films and digital exhibitions (short educational documentaries) such as Flashpoints Interviews, A Brief History of Mother Emanuel AME Church, Carolina Gold, Memories of the Enslaved, Gullah Geechee Overview Film, Praise House Film, A Brief History: International Longshoremen's Association Local 1422, A Brief History: Moving Star Hall, Community Connections: The Parks-Wilder Family, and more. 

Joshua also directed the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture’s Documenting the Arc project, which interviewed over 30 activists, artists and organizers who were involved in the movement for justice in Charleston, South Carolina, in the aftermath of the Mother Emanuel AME church massacre and murder of Walter Scott.

Artist Statement 

I use photography to document Black life, and explore social and cultural histories in Charleston and the Lowcountry. Typical representations of Charleston, reflecting its vast marshlands, serene rural landscapes, picturesque plantations and craggy cobblestone roads, are destabilized by my work. I challenge the mythology of Charleston as the best city in the world and directly confront this curated narrative through this development of new images of Black working class residents. My work preserves and presents new images of Lowcountry Black working class residents in the midst of the Charleston area rapidly changing demographic These images reflect Black people’s relationships to land, water, and cityscape as the basis of subsistence, autonomy, survival, and collective memory, and how these elements influence social and cultural development. Ultimately, viewers must reckon with the city’s difficult history, and the faces of the people who bear the brunt of this burden, through portraiture and documentary photography.