"Unwavering Vision #1: 3160 Images of Social Change from the ICP Collections" to open on January 27

Opening January 27, Unwavering Vision #1: 3160 Images of Social Change from the ICP Collections is an interactive multimedia presentation by Alan Govenar, Jean-Michel Sanchez, and Julien Roger, and is produced by Documentary Arts in association with on-situ. Installed in the free public space in the ICP Museum at 250 Bowery, the piece incorporates more than three thousand images dealing with social change from the ICP’s permanent collection.

At its core, Unwavering Vision #1 is an artwork and an interactive metaphor, simultaneously alluding to the tenacity of “concerned” photographers and to the commitment of ICP to open dialogue about imagemaking, past and present. It welcomes public engagement and comments as it evolves. The installation is supported in part by Communities Foundation of Texas.

Perpetual Revolution: The Image and Social Change—an examination of the relation between today’s overwhelming image world and the volatile social sphere we inhabit—also opens at the ICP Museum on January 27.

About Documentary Arts

Founded in 1985 by Alan Govenar to present new perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures, Documentary Arts, Inc. is a non-profit organization based in Dallas and New York. Documentary Arts’ work with major institutions—including the National Endowment for the Arts, African American Museum (Dallas), FARO (Brussels), Maison des Cultures du Monde (Paris), and UNESCO (Nairobi)—have highlighted little-known practitioners of cultural forms via photography, films and videos, audio recordings, oral histories, exhibitions, public programs, new technologies, and collections of material culture.

Unwavering Vision #1 is part of an ongoing collaboration between ICP and Documentary Arts. This partnership consists of a significant donation to ICP from the Documentary Arts Collection and a Documentary Arts Fellowship, which supports the careers of promising students enrolled in ICP’s Full-Time Programs (Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism, General Studies in Photography, New Media Narratives, and ICP-Bard MFA) to deepen their photography practice.

In this installation are sixty-five selections from the 60,000-work Texas African American Photography (TAAP) Archive, the centerpiece of Documentary Arts’ gift to the ICP in 2014 of more than 100,000 photographs, films, videos, and audio recordings. The TAAP Archive, founded by Govenar and Kaleta Doolin, focuses primarily on the work of twentieth-century African American community photographers active in rural and urban Texas.