“Homeward to the prairie I come” is the first line of a poem that Kansas native Gordon Parks wrote in 1984. It was part of a commission from a local newspaper for a special insert to celebrate its centennial. Parks visited Manhattan, Kansas, in 1984 for the commission and returned in 1985 for a second residency. These activities exemplify the many relationships Parks forged in his home state during his career.

This exhibition features photographs selected and donated by Parks to Kansas State University in 1973 after he received an honorary doctorate degree there. The gift includes not only images from stories published in LIFE magazine, such as those of the da Silva and Fontenelle families, but also experimental ones, such as the multiple exposure The Stranger and Table in Snow, a study in subtle variations of white.

In addition, Parks created new narratives and thematic groups from such assignments as Paris fashions, Fort Scott Revisited, and Muhammad Ali to reflect his thoughts on photography as a fine art medium and his work vis à vis celebrated paintings and sculptures. As a result, the gift becomes a kind of self-portrait expressing Parks’s wide-ranging artistic ideas beyond documentary photography. Most significantly, the photographs instigate cultural change by challenging viewers to imagine a more inclusive culture than the one they know: a world where Black skin represents ideal beauty, where an African American athlete embodies the exemplary hero, and where an artist of African heritage has a place within the lineage of excellent artists in Western art history.

An open-access digital catalog accompanies this exhibition. The exhibition is available virtually at mkbma.org