FRANK STEWART
Riffs & Responses

June 3rd- August 5th, 2023

gallery neptune & brown is pleased to announce our third exhibition, Riffs and Responses, with nationally renowned photographer Frank Stewart. This exhibition will lay bare the inner workings of the American jazz scene through beautifully crafted photographs spanning decades.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1949, Frank Stewart’s first remembrance of taking snapshots was as a fourteen-year-old with his mother at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Since then, the scope of his work has focused on documenting African American culture and its marginalization, which reflects his upbringing in the segregated, mid-century American South. As a young photographer, he studied at Middle Tennessee State and later attended the Art Institute of Chicago in 1972, where he was a student of Garry Winogrand. He received his BFA in photography from Cooper Union where he studied under Roy DeCarava. Stewart later became the assistant and photographer to the American artist, Romare Bearden, after the two met in 1975 while filming the documentary Two Centuries of Black American Art. They continued working together until Bearden's passing in 1988.

Stewart’s now over fifty-year-long career reflects thirty years of international travel accompanying the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra as their senior photographer. It is through this lens that Stewart has captured a uniquely American phenomenon and export: Jazz! From a young age, Stewart was exposed to gospel, blues and jazz music through his mother Dorothy Jean Lewis Stewart as well as his stepfather, jazz pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. However, it was not until the 1970s that Stewart began photographing jazz when he traveled with Ahmad Jamal. Later in the 80s and early 90s, he traveled with the Wynton Marsalis Septet and co-created the book, Sweet Swing Blues on the Road with Marsalis. During this time Stewart worked in jazz clubs in New York and Chicago and ultimately became the senior photographer of Jazz for the Lincoln Center in 1993.

In this exhibition, Stewart crafts curated compositions beyond mere photographic documentation of the jazz scene. His intimate exposure to the musicians of this breathtaking art form renders him ideally placed to beckon us into the world of jazz. Playing upon this musical genre, Stewart’s photos expose his own riffs and responses to the melodic and fluctuating nature of jazz. In his own words: “…the photograph is always changing, just like the music is always changing. It can be rhythmic, it can be harmonious, have open spaces, repetition of form, forms turned around, inverted.”

Riffs and Responses will run concurrently with Stewart’s traveling museum exhibition which debuts at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC on June 10th, 2023. Stewart’s work can be found in museum collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian’s African American Museum of Art and Culture in Washington D.C. as well as in private collections around the world. For further information please contact Robert Brown at rbgal2@gmail.com.

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