3 P.M.
Welcome | Bob Workman, director, Ulrich Museum of Art McKnight Art Center, Room 210 Bob Workman, Director of the Ulrich Museum of Art, will begin the community symposium that will showcase three Wichita museums partnerships with simultaneous exhibitions devoted to Gordon Parks, a Kansas native and one of the most celebrated African American artists of his time. Talk will be held at the McKnight Art Center, Room 210 Visit:ulrich.wichita.edu/visualjustice for complete symposium schedule.

3:15 P.M. Jamal Cyrus | When Images are Deployed
Houston-based artist, Jamal Cyrus, will focus on what he understands as the political, psychological and spiritual deployment of imagery within our society. Extending photography’s role beyond the selfie and the documentary, Cyrus will explore the ways in which the medium operates in a realm of powerful symbolic frameworks that control our movement and thought, addressing these concepts as they relate to his photographic, sculptural, and installation work both as an individual artist and with the collective Otabenga Jones and Associates.

4:15 P.M.Julia Brown | Unfitting Images
Julia Brown, Assistant Professor of Painting at George Washington University, will discuss work from her current exhibition The Swim at the Ulrich Museum of Art. Using her own research into photographic documentation of the Civil Rights Movement, including Florida wade-in protests over beach segregation, Brown asks why certain images and events come to be iconic of a time, a people, and a movement, while others are overlooked, buried, or forgotten.

5:15 P.M. Reception and exhibition viewing Ulrich Museum of Art

6 P.M. John Edwin Mason | Visual Justice: Gordon Parks’ American Photographs
CAC Theater
John Edwin Mason is Associate Professor of History and Associate Chair of the Department of History at the University of Virginia where he teaches African history and the history of photography. He is currently working on Gordon Parks and the American Democracy, a book about the ways in which Parks’ Life magazine photo-essays on social justice and the books that he published during the Civil Rights Movement challenged Americans’ notions of citizenship and made him one of the era’s most significant interpreters of the black experience. Mason will illustrate the ways in which Parks employed photography and prose as tools through which he attempted to collapse the space between the promise and the reality of the “American dream.”