Publication

  • Untitled (Structures)
    Leslie Hewitt, Karen Kelly, and Barbara Schroeder
    Editors
    Bradford Young
    Contributor
    Dancing Foxes Press, 2021
  • GRANTEE
    Leslie Hewitt & Bradford Young
    GRANT YEAR
    2016

Leslie Hewitt, in collaboration with Bradford Young, location shot of Untitled (Structures), 2012. Courtesy of the artists and Lucien Terras, Inc.

Beginning with Untitled (Structures), a film installation completed by Leslie Hewitt in collaboration with cinematographer Bradford Young in 2012, this multifaceted book opens up and merges discourses regarding photography, film, and architecture with questions of displacement, the archive, and documentation. After two years of research with the Menil Collection’s civil rights era photography collection and filming in the context of Chicago, Memphis, and the Delta region of Arkansas, Hewitt and Young address the topographic, corporeal, and psychological landscapes of civil rightsera photography. Their project points to unexpected traces of history in contemporary life, and questions of erasure and anti-monumentalism surface as central themes alongside an exploration of image and memory. The forthcoming publication records the project through pre and post-production research, visual and textual documentation, and commissioned essays.

Leslie Hewitt is an artist living in New York City. Hewitt graduated from the Cooper Union's School of Art in 2000 and earned an MFA from Yale University in 2004. From 2001 to 2003, she studied Africana Studies and Cultural Studies at New York University. She has displayed her work in a number of American and international galleries. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, among others. Hewitt was represented in MoMA's New Photography 2009, including recent work that expands the conventional definitions of photography. She was the Spring 2012 Guna S. Mundheim Fellow in the visual arts at the American Academy, Berlin. Untitled (Structures) will be featured in exhibitions at  Toronto's Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and at the Sculpture Center, Long Island City, Queens, New York.

A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Bradford Young received his bachelor's of arts and MFA from Howard University. Young's feature credits include Selma, directed by Ava DuVernay, which was nominated for Best Picture at the 2014 Academy Awards; Sheep, White Lies, directed by James Spooner (Afropunk), which made its premiere at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival; and Mississippi Damned, directed by Tina Mabry, which made its world premiere at the 2009 Slamdance Film Festival and was developed at Project FIND's directors and producers lab. His credits as a documentary cinematographer include Eventual Salvation, directed by Dee Rees, which won the 2007 Sundance Documentary Fund, and the 2007 Tribeca All Access Creative Promise Award. Other documentaries include Alicia in Africa, directed by Earle Sebastian, and The Western Front directed by Zachary Iscol.