Michael Cunningham, whose photographs of African-American women have been displayed in the Smithsonian Institution’s Anacostia Museum, Atlanta’s High Museum, Mobile Museum of Art and many others, will speak Friday, April 12, at Miles College, in advance of his exhibition, “Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats.”Cunningham is the co-author of a book with the same title, which has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, and on CBS News Sunday Morning, and has a foreword by Maya Angelou. It has sold more than 110,000 copies.
He started the Crowns project by observing African-American women’s tradition of wearing hats to Sunday church services.
“My mother was an evangelist, and she taught us that women should cover their heads out of respect for God,” Cunningham said Thursday. “My mother didn’t wear the fancy hats, just a scarf over her head, but when I moved to North Carolina I saw more of the fancier hats — hats with more depth and dimension.”
Diverting from his job as a commercial photographer, he sought out women and their hats for a personal project.
“A lot of these women come from menial backgrounds, working as maids and domestics,” he said. “They don’t get to dress up during the week, so Sunday was the day they would dress up, go to church and put on this big fancy crown – colorful hats decorated with sequins and bows. I titled the project ‘Crowns’ because I thought of these women as queens. It was a mixture of faith and fashion.”
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article courtesy of BCNN1.com
