Occupying Wall Street & Covid Journals

Accra Shepp

Weaved throughout the main floor of Express Newark is Accra Shepp’s “Occupying Wall Street,” an installation that features nineteen black-and-white portraits from his documenting of New York City’s 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement. Using a large-format view camera, this was Shepp’s first foray into documentary photography. Here, he captures a range of individual and collective portraits, showcasing the movement’s diversity, intimacy, and impact. His 4×5 film exposure slows the photo-making process, informing his audience of the smaller, detailed moments that work to create and sustain a movement. 

The projected thirty-four black-and-white images are from Shepp’s “Covid Journals” series. The series documented the early stages of the pandemic in New York City, and Shepp redeployed his medium-format camera to photograph the Black Lives Matter activism that resurged during the pandemic. Demanding justice for Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others lost to police brutality, Shepp’s large-scale portraits present people wearing or bearing an array of signs, gestures, and symbols that remind viewers of the everyday dignity and kaleidoscopic diversity that constitutes Black Lives Matter.

On the archival wall, Shepp interweaves protest portraits of the Black Lives Matter uprisings with pivotal images from the Newark Rebellion of 1967 to bridge the ongoing struggle for racial justice through place and time on a large vinyl display. In addition to that activation, Shepp made a short film that opens with Hettie Jones—the poet, writer, and Jones’s first wife—in conversation with Shepp during the International Center for Photography’s 2017 public program “Radical Conversation: Making America Great.” Emphasizing the art of “starting small,” Jones considers where movements begin and inspires Shepp to film himself protesting in front of the United States Federal Courthouse with the recording “We Are the Blues” as a sonic backdrop. Composed by Archie Shepp, the avant-garde jazz saxophonist and Accra Shepp’s father, the song features poetry by Amiri Baraka, making this a rare collaboration between these lifelong friends. Here, Shepp encourages visitors to take a postcard and use “We Are the Blues” as inspiration for their own protest and performance art.

About Accra Shepp

Accra Shepp is an artist and writer, based in New York and teaches at the School of Visual Arts. His images have been exhibited worldwide and are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. His writing has appeared in The New York Times and the New York Review of Books as well as his artist’s book Atlas (in the collection of the New York Public Library and the Whitney Museum Library), and Windbook, an artist-book installation at the National Library of Luxembourg. His book, Radical Justice: Lifting Every Voice was published in 2022 by Convoke. Most recently he is the recipient of the Cullman Scholars Fellowship from the New York Public Library and additionally was a senior Fulbright Fellowship to Indonesia. He has also participated in residencies at MacDowell, Civitella, and Light Work. In addition to his project, “The Islands of New York” he is working on a show titled, “The Monhegan Wildlands” with the Bowdoin College Art Museum and is completing work on his second book, The Covid Journals.