DuSable Black history museum to host screening honoring Chicago artist Norman Parish

DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center

The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center will host a documentary screening Friday evening honoring Chicago artist Norman Parish.

The screening, titled “Walls of Respect: Norman Parish and the Parish Art Gallery,” will honor the life and work of the artist and art dealer.

Parish founded an art gallery in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Georgetown in 1991 where artists from the African diaspora were “spotlighted in a way like never before, cementing its position as one of the most prominent black-owned galleries in the country,” according to the museum’s website.

Parish was one of several artists who contributed to the “Wall of Respect,” a mural that depicted images of African-American achievements on Chicago’s South Side in 1967. A fire broke out near the mural in Chicago’s Grand Boulevard neighborhood in 1971, and the building that displayed the work was eventually destroyed.

Parish was part of a politically active group of Black artists early in his career and continued painting after going to Washington in 1988 to take a job with an environmental company as a computer graphics designer, according to the Washington Post.

The screening is the second in the museum’s “DuBlack Film: Legacy Series” and will take place at 740 E. 56th Place from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

After the screening, Parish’s son and Chicago Sun-Times Deputy Managing Editor Norman Parish III will be available for a conversation and a question-and-answer session.