The Black Rest Project presents Joshua Rashaad McFadden: I Believe I’ll Run On

In celebration of American visual artist and Assistant Professor of Photography at Rochester Institute of Technology, Joshua Rashaad McFadden’s recently released book, I Believe I’ll Run On, we are pleased to have him present this masterful tome, how it fits into the larger themes he explores in his work, and to have him in conversation with fellow American artist, Lyle Ashton Harris.

By observing the interiority and quietude of Black people, despite the arduous marathon towards justice and the various trials and tribulations that simultaneously impede and inspire it, McFadden’s photographs explore and celebrate the intimacies of Black life in the United States. This early-career survey not only demonstrates McFadden’s mastery of a wide range of photographic genres—social documentary, reportage, portraiture, book arts, and fine arts—and his use of the medium to confront racism and anti-Black violence, but also is a testament to the healing and protective possibilities of turning inward. He critically examines race, masculinity, sexuality, and gender in the United States to reveal the destructive impact of these constructs on Black Americans. Like Black photographers before him, such as Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, and LaToya Ruby Frazier, McFadden documents the beauty of Black life and illuminates the specificity of Black living in our historical present, including a series of impactful photographs devoted to the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. The talk will be followed by time for Q&A from the audience.

American artist and Professor of Art and Art Education at NYU Steinhardt, Lyle Ashton Harris’s diverse artistic practice also comments on societal constructs of sexuality and race, while exploring his own identity as a queer, Black man. In conversation they will unpack how one can find an internal rest in the face of these societal constructs. How is the observation of quietude in Black people through art, in and of itself an act of resistance?