The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College Chicago will host an exhibition titled “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground,” guest curated by Harvard professor Sarah Lewis. Opening September 3, the show draws from MoCP’s permanent collection and features 70 photographers—including Gordon Parks, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange, and Carrie Mae Weems—to imagine the life Emmett Till might have lived had he not been lynched in 1955. The exhibition includes images of Chicago, the railways Till traveled, and milestones he missed, such as the Chicago Bulls phenomenon, Barack Obama’s election, and ongoing civil rights protests.
The exhibition matters because it reframes a traumatic historical event through a lens of possibility and civic reflection, honoring Till’s legacy while engaging with contemporary questions of racial justice and visual culture. It opens nearly a decade after the controversy over Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and it builds on Lewis’s work with Vision & Justice, which explores the role of visual culture in American democracy. By inviting viewers to contemplate what freedom means, the show connects past and present struggles for racial equality.