Sherry Turner DeCarava Presents
The Sweet Flypaper of Life at Shakespeare & Co
Tuesday, March 19, 7:00 pm
NEW YORK, NY, March 4, 2019 –The voices of Sister Mary Bradley and The Sweet Flypaper of Life, the 1955 bestseller by photographer Roy DeCarava and poet Langston Hughes, come alive when art historian Sherry Turner DeCaravatakes guests on a journey through daily moments in Harlem on Tuesday, March 19, 7:00 pm, at Shakespeare & Co., 2020 Broadway between 69th& 70th Streets on the Upper West Side in Manhattan.
Sherry Turner DeCarava, publisher and art historian, will talk about the unique collaboration between Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, Roy’s photography and the scope of his work.
Sherry Turner DeCarava, publisher and art historian, will talk about the unique collaboration between Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes, Roy’s photography and the scope of his work.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life, re-published by First Print Press and distributed by David Zwirner Books and D.A.P.,is a moving, photo-poetic work about people, promise and peril in Harlem. In 1952, DeCarava won a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. With the modest financial support of the one-year grant, DeCarava compiled 141 images of Harlem life he had been making since the mid-1940’s. Langston Hughes supplied a fictive narration from the perspective of a Harlem resident (Sister Mary Bradley), who leads the reader through her reflections on life in that city-within-a-city.
The book features a number of wonderful, enduring voices and images: from an inscrutable but proud boy, David, poised against a traffic light, to kids cooling off with the water spray from a fire hydrant; from a father holding his two children while he’s in deep conversation, to the tightly framed image of a preacher’s tambourine and drum in search of its next opportunity to give the daily music for spirit seekers. In the decades since its first publication, The Sweet Flypaper of Lifehas continued to speak to generations of Americans who share the value in its inclusive story and collaborative design.
December 9, 2019 marks the Centennial of the Harlem-born, New York-based artist/photographer Roy DeCarava (pronounced: Dee-cah-rah-vah) (1919-2009). The first African-American photographer to win the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship award, DeCarava’s wide-ranging expressive and iconic explorations of American life – photographic meditations on human and civic relationships, incisive studies of individuals in urban grounds, landscapes, abstractions and images of key creative moments in the lives of jazz musicians – made him one of the most widely accomplished photographic artists of the modern American era.
Roy DeCarava’s work is included in the Soul of a Nation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum now through February 3. Other in-depth exhibitions of DeCarava’s work, slated through 2019, are planned around similar and expanded themes and will be hosted by a variety of venues, including the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and the David Zwirner Gallery in New York. These Centennial events include public seminars, talks and readings, musical performances, and multi-media exhibitions whose program details are forthcoming. The first solo DeCarava exhibition in the Centennial Series will open in California this year.
For more information on the Roy DeCarava Centennial Celebration curated by The Roy and Sherry DeCarava Archives and First Print Press, please log on to www.decarava.org.
The book features a number of wonderful, enduring voices and images: from an inscrutable but proud boy, David, poised against a traffic light, to kids cooling off with the water spray from a fire hydrant; from a father holding his two children while he’s in deep conversation, to the tightly framed image of a preacher’s tambourine and drum in search of its next opportunity to give the daily music for spirit seekers. In the decades since its first publication, The Sweet Flypaper of Lifehas continued to speak to generations of Americans who share the value in its inclusive story and collaborative design.
December 9, 2019 marks the Centennial of the Harlem-born, New York-based artist/photographer Roy DeCarava (pronounced: Dee-cah-rah-vah) (1919-2009). The first African-American photographer to win the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship award, DeCarava’s wide-ranging expressive and iconic explorations of American life – photographic meditations on human and civic relationships, incisive studies of individuals in urban grounds, landscapes, abstractions and images of key creative moments in the lives of jazz musicians – made him one of the most widely accomplished photographic artists of the modern American era.
Roy DeCarava’s work is included in the Soul of a Nation exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum now through February 3. Other in-depth exhibitions of DeCarava’s work, slated through 2019, are planned around similar and expanded themes and will be hosted by a variety of venues, including the Broad Museum in Los Angeles and the David Zwirner Gallery in New York. These Centennial events include public seminars, talks and readings, musical performances, and multi-media exhibitions whose program details are forthcoming. The first solo DeCarava exhibition in the Centennial Series will open in California this year.
For more information on the Roy DeCarava Centennial Celebration curated by The Roy and Sherry DeCarava Archives and First Print Press, please log on to www.decarava.org.
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