From the First Note: Developing Icons, 2026

September 1, 2026 – Ongoing

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Created during the artists’ year-long residency with SHINE Portrait Studio, this is one of two projects on long-term exhibition on Express Newark’s fourth-floor.
 

From the First Note: Developing Icons re-examines the mid-century landscape of jazz through a layered reimagining of archival photography. By honoring the tactile, physical process of analog film—surfacing 35mm and 120 medium format negatives, slide transparencies, darkroom prints, loupes, light leaks, and exposed film sprockets—this series makes visible the material history of photographic memory: how musical genius was seen, framed, preserved, and illuminated.

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The 1940s, 50s, and 60s represented an extraordinary convergence where jazz and photography underwent parallel revolutions. As young musicians—caught in the urgency of their nascent, formative years—pushed past traditional harmonic boundaries to forge bebop, modal jazz, and free improvisation, photography was rapidly evolving into a dynamic vehicle for cultural documentation. Visionary photographers like William P. Gottlieb, Frank Driggs, Chuck Stewart, Lisette Model, and Kwame Brathwaite stepped inside intimate rehearsal rooms, smoke-filled clubs, and backstage dressing rooms, capturing the quiet interiority, style, and explosive energy of a burgeoning musical culture.

This era also marked a pivotal transition in visual history with the rise of color film, particularly the vivid tonal spectrum of Kodachrome and slide transparencies. Color film redefined how movement, fashion, and urban reality were documented, rendering the jazz scene not in distant historical grayscale, but in rich, vibrant immediacy.

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Accented across the series by a gold clef—a visual marker echoing both the brass of the horns and the sacred value of the musical canon—each composition bridges the physical darkroom artifact with the sonic genius of the stage.

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Rooted in the cultural geography of New Jersey—a vital epicenter for jazz history and home to visionaries like Sarah Vaughan, Wayne Shorter, Max Roach (a long-time professor at Rutgers University–New Brunswick), and Amiri Baraka—From the First Note: Developing Icons foregrounds these artists at the dawn of their transformative careers. In direct conversation with A Grandassa Sunday, this work honors a defining moment where music, style, photographic innovation, and cultural self-determination aligned to shape the visual consciousness of a generation.

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Archival Provenance & Educational Note

The works in this exhibition are original, transformative digital collages created for site-specific educational display. Archival photographs incorporated within these compositions are sourced from public collections (including the William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress), institutional archives (including the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University), and historic press repositories. Imagery is presented in accordance with Public Domain status, institutional courtesy, and transformative Fair Use (17 U.S.C. § 107) for non-commercial educational display and critical art-historical analysis.

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