Knight Purchase Award: Helen Levitt

In 1943, a 30-year-old artist who had been photographing for around five years had her first solo exhibition. It was held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, one of the pinnacles of art world success both then and now. That extraordinary, precocious artist was Helen Levitt, winner of the Akron Art Museum’s 2007 John S. and James L. Knight Purchase Award for Photographic Media. Never a household name, Levitt has always been regarded as "a photographer’s photographer." This exhibition, held 66 years later, comprises pictures from the Akron Art Museum’s collection including works donated by the artist’s colleagues, friends and admirers over the past decade, as well as the recent Knight Award purchases.