This beautifully calibrated group exhibition, organized by Hilton Als, a staff writer at this magazine, is subtitled “A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin.” The thesis of the stirring visual essay is that Baldwin has become a stock character—a civil-rights prophet—and that this, however powerful, is a diminishment of the man. Als fleshes out his portrait with a daringly eclectic assortment of art works and documents, which shift in tone from rapturous (paintings by Beauford Delaney and Alice Neel) to harrowing (a fever-dream animation about the antebellum South by Kara Walker). Portraits of the writer by his lifelong friend Richard Avedon hang on the walls, along with a stark one of Michael Jackson dwarfed by his shadow, shot by Anthony Barboza—a prescient portrait of a black man subsumed by his legacy. Photographs of buildings in Belle Époque Paris, by Eugene Atget, establish Baldwin the boulevardier; photographs of the piers in Manhattan, taken by Alvin Baltrop during the pre-AIDS heyday of gay liberation, convey carnal desire. Each choice by Als eloquently amplifies the polyphony of Baldwin’s voice.

New Yorker, review by Andrea K. Scott