Overview

Radical Justicebrings together two bodies of socially-engaged photographic portraiture by Accra Shepp, who has documented New York City's Occupy Wall Street movement starting in 2011 and its racial justice/BLM protests since 2020. Working in the style of August Sander with a large format camera and black and white film, Shepp pictures fellow New Yorkers on their city's streets in acts of sit-ins and active protest, both unplanned and highly organized, both independent and unified, to address notions of the 99% and 1%, which have become part of the American political vernacular. Bearing witness to defining events of the last decade that echo the United States' longer historical arch, Shepp's empathetic depictions of fellow citizens standing up for the fair protection of the Constitution provide a prophetic mirror of current events, which reflects back centuries to where the American experiment began, to suggest where we'll find ourselves in the years to come.

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9780999782149

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There aren't many artistic renderings of Occupy. As a result, we are often left with little more than anecdotes of how diverse and varied the demographic makeup of the movement was. Radical Justice documents that history and reminds us that activists who have held our country accountable then are not so dissimilar from those who took to the streets in the summer of 2020. In doing so, Shepp's photographs channel the spirit of Occupy, and its biggest hope as expressed in that original e-mail from Adbusters in 2011: to [awaken] the imagination and, if achieved, propel us toward the radical democracy of the future. --Salamishah Tillet, The Nation

Author Information

Accra Shepp (b. 1962) has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums such as the African American Museum, Philadelphia, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum just to name a few. His work is in public collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Art Institute, Chicago and the Whitney Museum, New York among others. He has taught at a variety of schools including Princeton University, Columbia University, Wellesley College, Bowdoin College, and the School of Visual Arts. Shepp lives and works in New York City. Salamishah Tillet is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in criticism for her New York Times essays on race in arts and culture. She is the Henry Rutgers Professor of African American Studies and Creative Writing and the Director of Express Newark, a center for socially engaged art and design, at Rutgers University-Newark. She is a contributing critic-at-large for the New York Times, and the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination and the recent book, In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of An American Masterpiece. In 2003, she and Scheherazade Tillet founded A Long Walk Home, an organization that uses art to empower people to end violence against girls and women.

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