#seydou-keita

#seydou-keita

If you've never been, First Saturdays is the museum's long-running, community-centered series-and it's completely free. Expect live music and performances by Brooklyn-based artists, curator-led exhibition tours, film screenings, art-making activities, pop-up talks and a local marketplace, all unfolding across the museum well after regular closing hours. It's been a staple since 1998 and remains one of the city's best arguments for why museums shouldn't feel hushed or precious after dark.

Celebrated as one of the most outstanding 20th-century photographers, Keïta ran a photography studio in the Malian capital, Bamako, between the late 1940s and early 1960s, where he shot black and white portraits of fashionably dressed people, with the patterned backdrops that he is perhaps best known for. He also documented the social and political landscape in pre- and post-independence Mali. That work was introduced to the West in the early 1990s, first anonymously in New York and then later identified, in group and solo exhibitions