Adger Cowans is an American fine arts photographer and abstract painter.

Life and work

Cowans was born in

Columbus, Ohio Columbus () is the state capital and the most populous city in the U.S. state of Ohio. With a 2020 census population of 905,748, it is the 14th-most populous city in the U.S., the second-most populous city in the Midwest, after Chicago, and t ...

, on September 19, 1936. He obtained a Bachelor of Art degree in photography from Ohio University in 1958 and also an alumnus of School of Motion Picture Arts and School of Visual Arts in New York. While serving in the United States Navy, he worked as a photographer before moving to New York, where he later worked at Life magazine with photographer Gordon Parks and fashion photographer Henry Clarke. While in New York, he joined the

Kamoinge Workshop The Kamoinge Workshop is a photography collective that was founded in 1963. In 2013, the group stood as “the longest continuously running non-profit group in the history of photography.” The collective was born when two groups of African-Ameri ...

, an artists collective dedicated to showing the African Diaspora though photography, soon after it was established in 1963. He moved to Bridgeport, Connecticut after leaving New York. In 2001, he was awarded the Lorenzo il Magnifico alla Carriera in recognition of his Distinguished Career at Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art and also a recipient of the John Hay Whitney Fellowship and the Martin Luther King, Jr Visiting Scholars Award, Wayne State University. His work has been shown by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Fine Art Museum, the International Museum of Photography, and numerous other art institutions. The legendary photographer Gordon Parks, called him ''one of the most significant artists of our time and noted'', “Adger’s individualism sets him apart, simply because he follows his own convictions”. The 2020 Whitney Museum exhibition about the Kamoinge Workshop, Working Together chronicles Cowans' and other founding members' photographs of their communities during the 1960s social changes.

References

Resources

artist's website
* 202
Interview, November 5, 2020
Bridgeport Art Trail (site also includes video interview about his 2017 ''Patterns'' exhibition at City Lights Gallery.) * 2022 exhibition, Fairfield University (CT)
Adger Cowans: Sense & Sensibility
January 28 - June 18, 2022. Bellarmine Hall Galleries
Photography Collections Preservation Project
Living people American artists 1936 births Artists from Columbus, Ohio Ohio University alumni {{US-photographer-stub