The University of Minnesota gallery will present two photos by Hugh Bell in their upcoming fall exhibition, a group exhibition of over 100 Black American artists whose work incorporates the photographic medium.

Sarah Vaughan (1955)

LGBT Drag (ca. 1980s-1990s)

Rightly viewed, the whole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery, a grand panorama, in which all the great facts of the universe, in tracing things of time and things of eternity, are painted.” -- Frederick Douglass

The history of American photography and the history of Black American culture and politics are two interconnected histories. From the daguerreotypes made by Jules Lion in New Orleans in 1840 to the Instagram post of the Baltimore Uprising made by Devin Allen in 2015, photography has chronicled Black American life and Black Americans have defined the possibilities of photography. Frederick Douglass, a former enslaved person and nationally prominent abolitionist, recognized the quick, easy and inexpensive reproducibility of photography. He presciently developed a theoretical framework for understanding the implications of photography on public discourse in a series of four lectures he delivered during the Civil War. Frederick Douglass was the subject of photographic portraits 160 times; he was the most photographed American of the 19th century.

Sampling a range of photographic expressions from traditional photography to mixed media and conceptual art and spanning a timeframe that includes the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, A Picture Gallery of the Soul honors, celebrates, investigates, and interprets Black history, culture, and politics in the United States. The exhibition title comes from the Lecture on Pictures, delivered by Frederick Douglass in Boston in 1861.

Hugh Bell was a renowned art and commercial photographer, who worked in New York City over the course of his entire professional career. In 2014 GME was engaged on an exclusive basis by the Bell Estate to manage the collection of Hugh Bell’s photographs and to further the artist’s legacy. GME is committed to resurrecting the career of this overlooked photographer, through licensing of his photographs, republishing his out-of-print books, mounting curated exhibitions, and in identifying a long-term repository for this significant collection of photographic works.

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Hugh Bell Photos Chosen for A Picture Gallery of the Soul Exhibition at The Katherine E. Nash Gallery