Chester Higgins: Shared Memories is a major retrospective at Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York, 529 W 20th St, New York, running April 16 – June 20, 2026. It is the gallery’s third exhibition of Higgins’s work and features over forty black-and-white and color photographs spanning nearly seven decades.
Across generations and continents, Higgins has undertaken a sustained visual reckoning with history, identity, and inheritance, creating a record that restores presence where it has been obscured and asserts dignity where it has been denied. His photographs stand as both witness and affirmation, reclaiming the cultural and spiritual depth of Black life within the broader narrative of modern history. Shared Memories gathers this lifelong commitment into a singular statement of continuity, collective memory, pride, and authority.
“I make my images to bear witness to our presence, to the real and widespread accomplishments of people of African descent,” Higgins has said. From the beginning of his career, photography has been for him an act of responsibility. “I love the work that I do using my camera to make love to my people and my community.” His subjects are not distant observers of history; they are participants in it. That closeness defines his practice.
Chester Higgins Jr. (born November 1946) is an American photographer who was a staff photographer with The New York Times for more than four decades, and whose work has notably featured the life and culture of people of African descent. His photographs have over the years appeared in magazines including Look, Life, Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise, and Higgins has also published several collections of his photography, among them Black Woman (1970), Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa (1994), Elder Grace: The Nobility of Aging (2000), Echo of the Spirit: A Photographer’s Journey (2004) Ancient Nubia: African Kingdoms on the Nile (2012).
Higgins’s work has been the subject of many international exhibitions, and is held in notable collections, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Higgins lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Learn more about Chester Higgins: Shared Memories exhibit here: https://brucesilverstein.com/exhibitions/236-chester-higgins-shared-memories/overview/
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