Necessary Means Explores Gathering, Power and Black Life Through the Photography of Adreinne Waheed

By Chad Eric Smith, Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing, Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts

This fall, Howard University will present Necessary Means: Adreinne Waheed on Gathering & Power, an exhibition examining the dynamism, beauty, and political force of collective Black life across the African Diaspora through the photography of Adreinne Waheed.

Opening September 30 at the Howard University Museum in Founders Library, the exhibition brings together Waheed’s documentary street photography with selections from the Waheed Photo Archive, her extensive collection of found portraits documenting African American life from the Civil War to the present. On view through December 4, Necessary Means traces the relationship between Waheed’s formative experiences at Howard University and a photographic practice centered on protest, joy, community, and collective action. 

Curated by Kathryn Coney-Ali, co-executive director of the Howard University Gallery of Art, and Dr. Melanee C. Harvey-Fryar, associate professor of art history in the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts, the exhibition takes its title from traditions of anti-colonial and Black liberation thought that call upon communities to harness the tools necessary to confront systems of oppression. Within that framework, Waheed’s camera becomes a means of documenting not only resistance, but the relationships, cultural traditions, and everyday expressions through which Black communities create and sustain power. 

 

Howard as an Archival Foundation

Waheed’s connection to Howard is central to the exhibition.

As an undergraduate in Howard’s School of Communications in the early 1990s, she interned at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one of the world’s most significant repositories devoted to the global Black experience. Her exposure to its archival collections helped shape what the curators describe as an “archival aesthetic practice”—an approach that connects the preservation of historic Black images with her own contemporary documentation of Black communities around the world. 

The exhibition begins with those “Archival Foundations,” including selections of daguerreotypes from the Waheed Photo Archive, before moving into “Through a Howard Bison’s Viewfinder.” That section situates Waheed within the professors, artists, intellectuals, and peers who influenced her development at Howard. Her visual world was shaped by the legacies of the Black Arts Movement, the cinematic innovation of mentor Haile Gerima (Sankofa), and the evolving expressions of hip-hop culture among her generation of students.

Photographs from this period include the Rock Creek Drum Crew in 1994 and images from the 1995 Million Man March. A photograph reproduced in the exhibition captures marchers with their arms raised as the U.S. Capitol rises in the distance—an early example of Waheed’s enduring interest in the possibilities created when Black people occupy public space together. 

The Power of Gathering

From there, Necessary Means broadens its lens.

In “Power of Gathering,” Waheed’s photographs move from couples and families to festivals, demonstrations and communal celebrations, exploring Black joy, Black love, intergenerational connection, self-fashioned identity and contemporary expressions of “Black is Beautiful.”

That focus expands geographically in “Diasporic Joy & Power,” which brings together images of cultural traditions and movements across the African Diaspora—from struggles for equality in South Africa to J’Ouvert celebrations in Brooklyn and gatherings in Brazil and the United States. The images underscore the exhibition’s central premise: that assembly itself can generate spiritual, cultural and political energy. 

Several of Waheed’s more recent photographs make that connection between joy and resistance especially visible. The Light Bearer (2020), photographed during the Show Up for Black Womxn vigil in Brooklyn, centers a solitary figure illuminated within a nighttime gathering. Another image, taken during the 2020 HBCU March for the Generations in Washington, D.C., captures a protester in vivid clothing emblazoned with a message affirming Black lives. Fleet on Fleek (2017), meanwhile, portrays four Black sailors standing together in uniform—another manifestation of identity, presence and collective representation. 

 

The exhibition concludes with “Freedom of Form: Resist Conformity, Embrace Your Power,” a section focused on the ways Black communities move through and claim public space. Through gestures of protest, motion, celebration and collective presence, the final works ask viewers—particularly students—to consider the significance of their own bodies and movements within the world around them.

Building a Black Visual Record

Waheed has been making photographs since age 13 and has built a career spanning photography, editorial work, archival research and publishing. Her images have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Fader, The Crisis and Mfon: A Journal of Women Photographers of the African Diaspora. As a photo editor, she has produced and directed shoots for publications including Vibe, King and Essence. 

In 2010, she established the Waheed Photo Archive to preserve found photographs of African American life spanning more than a century. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired the archive in 2015, and selections later appeared in the museum’s 2018 publication Everyday Beauty. That same year, Waheed published her own photography book, Black Joy and Resistance. 

In Necessary Means, those archival and contemporary bodies of work are presented together for the first time, illuminating a throughline in Waheed’s practice: the photograph as an instrument of memory, repair, celebration and self-determination.

For Howard students in particular, the exhibition also tells a story about what can begin when an artist encounters an archive, a mentor, a community and a tradition—and then carries those influences forward into a life of creative practice. In Waheed’s work, preserving the past and photographing the present become interconnected acts, each helping to ensure that Black communities remain active authors of their own visual histories and futures.

Necessary Means: Adreinne Waheed on Gathering & Power will be on view September 30 through December 4, 2026, at the Howard University Museum in Founders Library at Howard University in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is curated by Kathryn Coney-Ali and Dr. Melanee C. Harvey-Fryar.