ArtCenter College of Design is proud to announce the exhibition Kwame Brathwaite: Things Well Worth Waiting For, on view April 17 through August 17, 2024. This major solo exhibition—the first in Southern California since Brathwaite’s death in April 2023, features approximately 50 of the artist’s color and black-and-white photographs from the 1960s through the 1970s.
While Brathwaite is best known for photographs that popularized the political slogan “Black is Beautiful” in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Things Well Worth Waiting For focuses on the late artist’s multifaceted relationship to music. Organized around three overlapping areas of his work: music, fashion and community, the exhibition features Brathwaite’s singular images of cultural luminaries such as Miles Davis, Marvin Gaye and Abbey Lincoln, alongside musicians, Models and community members in the Bronx and Harlem. Together, these works shed light on a fascinating period in 20th-century culture.
The exhibition also serves as a reintroduction of a prescient artist whose work has become increasingly relevant in recent years. This groundbreaking solo exhibition represents the second major survey of works by Kwame Brathwaite in Los Angeles, arriving on the heels of the nationally traveling exhibition Black is Beautiful: The Photography of Kwame Brathwaite and its accompanying publication, Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019).