The Bronx Museum News

With three simultaneous institutional exhibitions, including a new survey focused on New York titled “Eyes on the Street” at the Bronx Museum of Art, we checked in with the man that has used art to spread love and connection.

One of New York City’s most discerning and essential documentarians, photographer Jamel Shabazz has built a career around capturing the unique visual lexicon of the outer boroughs. 

Every so often, you encounter an individual whose very presence triggers an unprecedented helix of enlightening emotions and newfound perspectives. For me, that person was the Black visionary, alchemist, and image-maker, Jamel Shabazz. From photographing antiwar protests and impoverished communities to fashion moments and street engagement, the legacy of Jamel Shabazz paints itself as an everlasting…

He chronicled the fashion shifts of stylish young Black New Yorkers in the 1980s and ’90s in photographs celebrated at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.

Photographer Jamel Shabazz recounts documenting the community, style and energy of the streets in New York.

Starting at the young age of fifteen, Brooklyn born photographer Jamel Shabazz identified early on the core subject of his lifelong investigation: the men and women, young and old, who invest the streets of New York with a high degree of theater and style, mixing traditions and cultures.

Jamel Shabazz: Eyes on the Street was featured on artforum.com’s “Must-See Shows” list, our editors’ selection of essential exhibitions worldwide.“Must See” is a feature of artguide, which provides a comprehensive index to all art-world events.

In this review of Bronx Calling: The Fifth AIM Biennial, William Corwin begins with a description of Shopping on a Rainy Day (2015), by Estelle Maisonett and ends with the idea that Emily Henretta’s work Sisters (2020) “functions as a well-considered metaphor for the past two years and perhaps our current society as a whole.”

Featuring an image of AIM Artist Sarah K Williams performing “On the Upkeep of Demanding Shapes” at the Bronx Museum, this roundup mentioned three events on March 12, 2022 happening in conjunction with Bronx Calling: The Fifth AIM Biennial. 

In reference to the upcoming show Jamel Shabazz: Eyes on the Street, Andrea K. Scott says Shabazz “is often described as a proto-street-style photographer. But Shabazz’s pictures convey more than his subjects’ flair for fashion; his four-decade œuvre is an incisive portrait of outer-borough joy and resilience.”

New York’s “21 Questions” column is back with an eye on creative New Yorkers. The Brooklyn-born and Flatbush-raised photographer Jamel Shabazz first picked up a camera when he was 15 years old and has been documenting city life ever since. 

Initiative provides at-home testing to New Yorkers in areas of need at familiar community sites in all five boroughs