Join EPIP LA on a private tour of Roy DeCarava: Work of Art with Director Megan Steinman at The Underground Museum in Arlington Heights. The exhibition includes about 50 black and white photographs spanning the artist’s career of nearly six decades, with the greatest concentration in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. DeCarava trained to be a painter, but while using a camera to gather images for his printmaking work he began to gravitate toward photography, partly because of its immediacy but also because of the limitations he saw all around him for a black artist in a segregated nation. “A black painter, to be an artist,” he once said, “had to join the white world or not function — had to accept the values of white culture.” He became the first black photographer to win a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 and is perhaps best known for his portraits of jazz musicians. DeCarava’s full archive of images represents a broad search for visual meaning – from those jazz musicians to the civil rights movement, abstractions, studies of nature, and gestures of people.

Following the tour, we will have the chance to mingle over a light picnic in the Purple Garden, behind the museum.

Street parking is available, but limited. Rideshare is strongly encouraged. Space is limited for this event, so make sure to sign up today!