Dance Theatre of Harlem

Barboza took this photograph for GEO magazine, though its mood and structure place it as firmly within his personal work as within any editorial assignment. A member of the Kamoinge Workshop from 1963, when he arrived in New York from New Bedford, Massachusetts, at nineteen, Barboza built a career that moved easily between commissioned assignments and self-directed work. Across editorial, advertising, and personal projects alike, he cultivated the same exacting command of light, darkness, and tonal atmosphere visible here. That sensibility shaped bodies of work such as Black Borders and Black Dreams/White Sheets, as well as the various portraits of musicians, performers, and cultural figures that populate his oeuvre and helped define the visual world of Black artistic life in late twentieth-century New York.

The Dance Theatre of Harlem, founded in 1969 by Arthur Mitchell and Karel Shook, emerged directly from New York’s own cultural and political history. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Mitchell returned to Harlem determined to make classical ballet training available within the Black community and to build a company that would expand who could claim the art form. By the time Barboza photographed its dancers waiting in the wings in 1983, the company had become one of the city’s most important cultural institutions.

Anthony Barboza’s work has been exhibited in many solo and group shows and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Cornell University, the Brooklyn Museum, the Schomburg Center – NYPL, and the National Portrait Gallery, among others.

$2,800