Chester Higgins: Shared Memories Exhibit

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/

Chester Higgins work part of Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now at Metropolitan Museum

Photographer Chester Higgins a friend of African American Reports will have two of his works displayed at an exhibition, Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876-Now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.

Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now examines how Black artists and other cultural figures have engaged with ancient Egypt through visual art, sculpture, literature, music, scholarship, religion, politics, and performance. In a multisensory exploration of nearly 150 years of artistic and cultural production—from the 19th century to the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the present day—the exhibition includes nearly 200 works of art in a wide range of media.

Higgins told African American Reports that the exhibition ‘Flight Into Egypt’ embraces our agency of sacred heritage and examines the history of African people before slavery and Genesis. It’s an awesome starting point to consider our amazing sojourn and uniqueness as a people.

He also suggested that those who attend check out the catalog and a copy of his book ‘Sacred Nile' as a gift worthy of ourselves.

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.

The exhibtion runs November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025. The location is at The Met Fifth Avenue, The Tisch Galleries, Gallery 899 Floor 2.

BLACK PANTHEON Chester Higgins new exhibition of portraits opens September 14 2023

Chester Higgins new exhibition of portraits, BLACK PANTHEON opens at 5pm on Thursday, 14 September at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, 3rd floor, NYC and runs through 28 October 28th.

Black Pantheon, an exhibition of Chester Higgins’ portraits, is not a comprehensive overview of his life’s work but rather disparate but also strategically placed moments with individuals he encountered and photographed for over some fifty years. In framing the title of this exhibition under the rubric of pantheon we are guided by the photographer to view these faces and individuals as the greatest group of people he photographed. They belong together as iconic figures in the ‘then’ (history) and ‘contemporaneously’ (now). The images ignite the viewer's imagination considering the historical significance of the individuals who stood, sat, and performed in front of Higgins’ lense. Higgins seems at ease with his subjects, an ease informed by an electric curiosity that I believe Higgins has for people who transformed American history. His photographs are empowering, yet nuanced in framing social justice activists and artists (James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Harry Belafonte), we have read, or seen on screen and stage such as (Cicely Tyson, Sidney Poitier, Melvin Van Peebles) ) and activists we have followed on the news and/or on protest lines (Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz) or historians and political leaders (John Hendrick Clarke, Benjamin Mays, Shirley Chisholm) who perform their duties, and iconic figures who changed the course of the black experience globally like (Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela, Haile Selassie, Muhammad Ali). In my view his quest continues to document the human experience, a lifelong journey wherein a close read of his subjects is always paramount, and in that quest Higgins has unequivocally reshaped how black people globally have been viewed throughout the African diaspora.

CHESTER HIGGINS