It was at the very start of this journey that Willis first met Gordon Parks (1912 – 2006), and began a collaboration that would last throughout his life – and beyond. Now, on the occasion of the new exhibition, Gordon Parks: Voices in the Mirror at Jack Shainman in New York, Willis joins Black Panthers leader Kathleen Cleaver, author Alice Walker, filmmaker Ava Duvernay, and curator Thelma Golden, to reflect on the transcendent power of Parks’s life and works. Where Qubilah Shabazz chose a portrait of her father, Malcolm X, Lonnie Ali revisited Parks’s relationship with her husband, Muhammad Ali, writing, “They passed the torch, and they passed it fully lit.”
Willis is one of the torchbearers who continue to light the path as she walks. For the exhibition, she considers the 1942 portrait of charwoman Ella Watson titled, American Gothic, Washington D.C., which Parks created at the start of his career after as a member of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the fabled photography unit run by Roy Stryker.
The now-iconic portrait shows Watson standing in front of the American flag in a humble polka dot dress, surrounded by the tools of her trade: broom and mop. She looks through wire rimmed spectacles with a quiet intensity that does little to assuage the discomfiting realities of apartheid. As the only Black photographer on staff at the FSA, Parks stood among legends like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Russell Lee, poised to speak truth to power at the height of segregation. “He had a story to tell,” Willis says.
