Baldwin Lee | New England Portfolio Review Keynote Speaker

We are thrilled to welcome Baldwin Lee to the Griffin Zoom Room as our Keynote Speaker of the New England Portfolio Reviews. Mr Lee, a Chinese-American photographer and educator is most known for his photographs of African-American communities in the Southern United States. Mr. Lee, a graduate of MIT’s photography program under the mentorship of Minor White, a printer for Walker Evans, now an educator and practicing artist has crafted a beautiful, poignant and important body of work on the American South. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Lee will discuss his creative path, vision and impact in the field of photography.

Join us Friday May 5th at 7pm Eastern / 4pm Pacific ONLINE in the Griffin Zoom Room.

This event is part of the New England Portfolio Review Program. $5 to Griffin Museum and PRC members. $10 for Non Members. Interested in Membership at the Griffin and its benefits? More information about membership here

In 1983, Baldwin Lee (b. 1951) left his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, with his 4 × 5 view camera and set out on the first of a series of road trips to photograph the American South. The subject of his pictures were Black Americans: at home, at work, and at play, in the street, and among nature. This project would consume Lee—a first-generation Chinese American—for the remainder of that decade, and it would forever transform his perception of his country, its people, and himself. The resulting archive from this seven-year period contains nearly ten thousand black-and-white negatives. His monograph, Baldwin Lee, presents a selection of eighty-eight images edited by the photographer Barney Kulok, accompanied by an interview with Lee by the curator Jessica Bell Brown and an essay by the writer Casey Gerald. Arriving almost four decades after Lee began his journey, this publication reveals the artist’s unique commitment to picturing life in America and, in turn, one of the most piercing and poignant bodies of work of its time.