Photo: Fourandsixty / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Howard University will open a major exhibition by photographer and alumna Adreinne Waheed on 14 October, placing contemporary images of Black life alongside historic portraits from her landmark archive.
A visual record of community
Necessary Means: Adreinne Waheed on Gathering & Power will open at the Howard University Museum in Founders Library, part of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center in Washington, DC. The show brings together Waheed’s documentary street photography with selections from the Waheed Photo Archive, a collection of found images chronicling African American life from the Civil War era to the present.
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Howard says the exhibition examines the beauty, dynamism and political force of collective Black life across the African diaspora. Its focus spans joy, protest, community, cultural practice and the ways people build power through gathering.
The exhibition is curated by Kathryn Coney-Ali, executive director of the Howard University Gallery of Art, and Dr Melanee C. Harvey-Fryar, an associate professor of art history in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts. It is a collaboration involving the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, the Howard University Gallery of Art and Art Bridges.
Past and present in conversation
Waheed’s contemporary work records everyday public life and organised resistance, while her archive preserves vernacular portraits and family images often excluded from traditional historical collections. Howard says the two bodies of work will be presented together for the first time.
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That pairing matters because it rejects the idea that Black history begins only at moments of crisis or with famous figures. It positions ordinary people, families, organisers and communities as makers of history and as authors of their own visual record.
Waheed established the Waheed Photo Archive in 2010. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired the archive in 2015, and a selection later appeared in the museum’s 2018 publication Everyday Beauty. Waheed also published Black Joy and Resistance in 2018.
Opening programme and public access
The opening programme on 14 October includes an artist conversation with Waheed and artist Bisa Butler, moderated by Dr Rhea Combs, followed by a reception. Howard’s event listings say the exhibition will remain on view through 28 May 2027.
For Black audiences in Washington and across the diaspora, the show offers more than a retrospective of one artist’s work. It links a historically Black university, a major Black archive and a living photographic practice to make a clear argument: collective memory is not passive preservation, but a tool for self-determination.
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The exhibition opens during Howard’s homecoming period, when generations of alumni, students and visitors will gather on campus — a fitting setting for work concerned with what Black communities create when they come together.