Gordon Parks Gives Collection of Photos To Hometown Community College
FORT SCOTT, Kansas
Gordon Parks, the Fort Scott native who gained international fame as a photographer, author and filmmaker, has donated 30 of his photographs to the center bearing his name at Fort Scott Community College.
The donation was announced in October by Jill Warford, executive director of the Gordon Parks Center for Culture and Diversity at the college.
The announcement came during the annual Gordon Parks Celebration of Culture and Diversity. Parks, now 92 and living in New York, attended the first culture and diversity event a year ago.
“My gift makes my hometown of Fort Scott the largest repository of my work,” he said in a statement.
Another 51 of Parks’ photographs, plus 13 poems, are displayed at Fort Scott’s Mercy Health Center.
Warford says only a few people knew of the donation before the October announcement.
“It was like Christmas, pulling them out of the box and unwrapping them,” says Kari West, community relations director at the college.
The collection is valued at more than $250,000. Among the photographs is “American Gothic,” perhaps Parks’ best-known image. The picture he took in 1942 shows Ella Watson, a Black woman who mopped floors at the Farm Security Administration’s building in Washington D.C., standing in front of an American flag, stern-faced, with a mop in one hand and broom in the other.