A Conversation with Frank Stewart
Sunday, February 16, 2 PM

Program Description

Andre Kimo Stone Guess, President and CEO of Fund for the Arts, alongside acclaimed Louisville photographer Jon Cherry, will engage in a conversation with internationally renowned photographer Frank Stewart. They will discuss Stewart’s six-decade career, including his recent retrospective, “Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present,” co-organized by The Phillips Collection and Telfair Museums, and curated by Ruth Fine, formerly of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Fred Moten, a distinguished poet, scholar, and professor of performance studies at NYU’s Tisch School of Fine Arts. Guess and Stewart have known each other for over 30 years, having previously worked together at Jazz at Lincoln Center, where Stewart served as Senior Photographer.

Frank Bio

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Frank Stewart grew up in Memphis and Chicago. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago, where he was a student of Garry Winogrand and received a BFA in photography from The Cooper Union in New York, where he studied with Roy DeCarava. Stewart became the assistant and photographer to the artist, Romare Bearden, after the two met in 1975 while filming the documentary Two Centuries of Black American Art, a project organized by David C. Driskell. Stewart has exhibited photographs at The High Museum, Atlanta; Cooper Union Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Schomburg Center for Research, the International Center of Photography, in New York; Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC. He was a member of the first team of North American journalists invited by the Center for Cuban Studies to visit Cuba in 1977. He was also invited by the Los Angeles Olympic Committee to photograph the 1984 Olympic games. He has twice been granted a photographic fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a New York Creative Artist Public Service Award. He is a member of Kamoinge, an African-American photography collective based in New York. For three decades, he photographed the renowned performers for Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Andre Bio

André Kimo Stone Guess is a renowned arts leader with over 30 years of experience in nonprofit and arts management. He is the President & CEO of Fund for the Arts in Louisville, Kentucky. A native of Louisville’s Smoketown neighborhood, Guess has held key positions such as CEO of the August Wilson African American Cultural Center in Pittsburgh and Vice President and Producer of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. He operated GuessWorks, Inc., a consulting firm, for nearly 20 years, serving clients like the Obama Foundation and The Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay in Singapore. He has managed the careers of world-class musicians like Christian McBride and Nicholas Payton and produced a Grammy-winning record. Guess is also a writer, with works published by USA Today, The Courier-Journal, The Root, The Grio, and ESPN’s Andscape.

Jon Bio

Jon Cherry is a Pulitzer Prize-awarded American photojournalist whose work has spanned a wide range of photographic disciplines. His style has been described as deeply romantic, yet joyful. Born in Fort Liberty, North Carolina to parents in the US armed forces, Cherry now proudly calls himself a Kentuckian. Cherry aims to capture the true spirit of America while developing his storytelling craft through analysis of the truths that define our time. Cherry can be labelled a generalist, reporting on topics from extremism and government to agriculture and conservation. Cherry’s love for public art and music led to noted examples of cross-disciplinary collaborations that blur the lines between visual journalism and fine art.