“I suffered evils,” said the Black photographer Gordon Parks, who died in 2006, “but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand.” Expand he did, leaving behind an exceptional body of work that documents race relations in America from the 1940s to the new millennium. Parks was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in a segregated community, and the experience fueled his fight for social justice. This display spans both Jack Shainman galleries. One venue is dedicated to Parks’s most famous photojournalism, images that focus on Black life and struggle in midcentury America. The other features his portraits of freedom fighters, among them Malcolm X, Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali. —E.C.

This exhibition is on view at Jack Shainman gallery’s West 20th and 24th Street spaces