Here / Still / Now

The west side of Chicago is not the poorest, the oldest, the largest, or the most African American of African American communities in the United States--it is similar to every other swath of poverty in every single city. We are led to believe that these communities are in crisis when something occurs that lands them on the front page. The real crisis, however, is ongoing and it's one of acceptance of the conditions of poverty, day in and day out. Paul D'Amato's photographs won't change these neighborhoods, but they remind us that the individuals that live in them are as important as any one of us.

D'Amato's portraits give individual faces to the ongoing crisis in African-American communities like Chicago's West Side
Paul D'Amato grew up in Boston during the height of racial unrest, civil rights protest, and bussing. He moved to Oregon to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country four times a year--often by hitch-hiking and hopping freight trains--as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale, he moved to Chicago, where he continues to photograph until this day. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock- Krasner Grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. Paul is a professor at Columbia College, Chicago.
Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale University School of Art, and is Professor of Photography and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College, Chicago. He has received numerous fellowships over the course of his career, including the United States Artists Guthman Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Monographs and publications of his work include Dawoud Bey: Seeing Deeply (2018), Dawoud Bey: Picturing People (2012), Harlem, U.S.A. (2012), Class Pictures (2007), and Dawoud Bey: Portraits, 1975-1995 (1995). His works have been exhibited and collected extensively throughout the United States and abroad.
Amy M. Mooney is Associate Professor of Art History at Columbia College, Chicago. Her publications include a monograph on the Chicago painter Archibald J. Motley, Jr., volume IV of the David C. Driskell series on African American Art (2004), as well as contributions to anthologies and catalogs, including Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist (2014), Black Is... Black Ain't (2013), and Romare Bearden in the Modernist Tradition (2009). As an ACLS fellow in 2016-17, she is working on Portraits of Noteworthy Character: Negotiating a Collective American Identity, a project that examines the cultural capital of African American and immigrant portraiture.
Camara Dia Holloway is an art historian with expertise in African American art, American art, and the history of photography, who earned her PhD at Yale University. Her publications include Portraiture & the Harlem Renaissance: The Photographs of James L. Allen (1999). The Founding Co-director of the Association for Critical Race Art History (ACRAH), she is a well-known advocate for a critical race approach to art history. Dr. Holloway has previously taught at the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, and Swarthmore College.