Join ICP online for a conversation between ICP’s Managing Director of Programs David Campany, and recent Guggenheim Fellowship recipient Stephen Marc on the release of his newest publication, American/True Colors. Traveling the country for more than a decade, the book chronicles the American experience in all its triumphs and struggles. From parades, rodeos, festivals and historic sites, in 250 images, Stephen Marc captures “America as it is: multi-colored, multi-cultural, multi-racial, gender rich, and more diverse and urban than ever before in the nation's history.”
This program is free with a suggested donation of $5. Purchase your copy of American/True Colors through ICP's shop.
About the Book
A grand new look at America in 2020 and how its population is changing
From 2007 to 2020, spanning the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, noted photographer Stephen Marc traveled throughout America in search of its people. He went to parades and protests, memorials and celebrations, rallies and rodeos, amusement parks and festivities, historic sites and city streets to see America as it is: multi-colored, multi-cultural, multi-racial, gender rich, and more diverse and urban than ever before in the nation's history. Behind each of the book's 250 compelling images is a patriotic reminder of America's robustness and promise and ongoing struggles with race and socio-economic issues as it seeks to become, as Abraham Lincoln declared in 1862, "a more perfect union."
Stephen Marc's American/True Colors complements other significant photographic surveys of modern America: from Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson to Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, Mary Ellen Mark, Eli Reed, Bruce Davidson, Zoe Strauss, Leonard Freed, Vivian Maier, and others. But no photographer has so fully looked at America, from coast to coast, as has Stephen Marc with his unique African-American perspective.
American/True Colors is further enriched by a long interview with the artist by Rebecca A. Senf, Norton Family Curator of Photography at the Center for Creative Photography, and by a Jack Kerouac-like introductory essay by writer/critic Bill Kouwenhoven, who concludes: "Stephen Marc's vision leaves me breathless, and his eyes, as represented by his kaleidoscopic images, are vibrant testimony to the love he feels for our contradictory and self-contradicting land, one that too often seems at war with itself over the very shape of these United States."
About the Program Format
This program will take place on Zoom. Those who register to attend will receive a confirmation email with a link located at the bottom of the email under ‘Important Information’ to join the lecture through a computer or mobile device.
We recommend participants download the Zoom app on their device prior to the program. Learn how to download the latest version of Zoom to your computer or mobile device.
If you have not received the Zoom link by 3 PM EDT on the day of the lecture or if you have questions about the virtual lecture, please contact: programs@icp.org.
Speaker Bios
Stephen Marc is a documentary/street photographer and digital montage artist, who was raised on the South Side of Chicago. He is Professor of Art at Arizona State University, where he began teaching in 1998, after twenty years on the faculty of the Department of Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Marc received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021) and has received grants from theArizona Commission on the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and his awards include the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art and the Society for Photographic Education's Insight Award. Marc has published three photography books: Passage on the Underground Railroad (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), The Black Trans-Atlantic Experience: Street Life and Culture in Ghana, Jamaica, England, and the United States (Columbia College Chicago, 1992), and Urban Notions (Ataraxia Press, 1983). Since 2008, Passage on the Underground Railroad has been listed as an Interpretative Program of the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, a division of the National Park Service.
David Campany is ICP’s Managing Director of Programs, and a writer, editor, and curator
