Express Newark

Chester Higgins’s photographs feature sacred thresholds. A man praying in Ethiopia’s holy Sof Omar Caves captures the interplay of devotion and unseen spiritual forces of the natural environment. His Door of No Return, taken on Gorée Island in Senegal, evokes memories of those violently separated from their homelands during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Higgins’s photographs reflect on how the sacred transforms spaces into sites of memory and transcendence. These portals reckon with the past and imagine renewal.

These works evoke barzakh, demonstrating how photography offers glimpses of the unseen that shape and sustain our reality.

Chester Higgins Photographs are featured in the “Powers of the Unseen” exhibition, on view through July 31st.

Artwork credits:
Chester Higgins Jr., Thelonius Monk, New York., 1973 Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., The Door of No Return, Gorée Island, Dakar, Senegal, 1973. Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., Cloth Vendor, Dakar, Senegal, 1972. Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., Islamic Funeral at Negash Amedin Mosque in Ethiopia
2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., Sacred Nile (Series) “The Sacred Cave of Sof Omar” in Bole Mountains, Ethiopia
2010. Courtesy of the artist.

Closing Soon: Ritual features work by artists, curators, students, and community members who’ve immersed themselves in nonsecular expressions of spirituality and Islamic traditions across the Muslim world. These works span Newark, which has long been home to one of our nation’s largest African American Muslim communities, while also branching out beyond the domestic borders of the United States to unite members of the global community.

By bridging traditional spiritual practices and aesthetic innovations, these artistic explorations turn towards Muslim interiorities—an often underrepresented perspective in art—to create timely meditations that center art and ritual and inspire new discourses, worldviews, and conversations about belief and identity.

Ritual is on view through July 31st at Express Newark.

Surrounded by a seated squad of Nation of Islam women, a baby gazes directly into Gordon Parks’s lens. The composition reminds the viewer of the presence of the camera and the photographer. In another photograph, a group of women in a V-formation stand in front of a large photograph of the Taj Mahal, a queen’s tomb. Dressed alike in custom white hijab and long buttoned jackets of National of Islam women, their uniform gaze represents their fused spirit of faith.

In the artworks, the Unseen manifests as a form of unknowability—a dimension that shapes our reality. The photographs highlight the hidden, the invisible, the secret, and the absent, concepts associated with Sufi Islam, a powerful tradition of spiritual contemplation in which aspirants seek to experience the divine. By using photography to explore these themes, the artworks shift the burden of representation from those under scrutiny to the beholder.

The “Powers of the Unseen” exhibition is on view through July 31st at  .

Artwork credits:
Untitled, Chicago, Illinois, 1963. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.

Ethel Sharrieff, Chicago, Illinois, 1963. Courtesy of and copyright The Gordon Parks Foundation.