The Brooklyn Museum has opened "Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit," a major solo exhibition dedicated to the pioneering American photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978). The show features nearly 200 works drawn from the museum's extensive collection of 2,000 negatives and 340 prints, gifted by Kanaga's third husband, artist Wallace Putnam. Kanaga, one of the nation's first women photojournalists, is celebrated for her socially conscious images capturing labor activists, the poor, and African Americans under Jim Crow laws, as well as cityscapes, portraits, and still lifes. The exhibition is organized with Madrid's Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and curated by Drew Sawyer, formerly of the Brooklyn Museum and now at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
This exhibition matters because it represents only the second dedicated show of Kanaga's work at the Brooklyn Museum, the first being her initial major retrospective in 1993. It brings long-overdue recognition to a photographer who was "ahead of her time" in documenting racism and segregation, using her camera as a tool for social justice. By highlighting Kanaga's rare compositional eye and her commitment to marginalized subjects, the show challenges art-historical neglect and positions her as a significant figure in American photography, alongside peers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen.