Exhibit Dates: May 29— June 26, 2025
Exhibit Location: MLK Library, Floor 1 (Great Hall)
In celebration of World Pride 2025, the MLK Library will host an exhibit featuring four large scale banners in the Great Hall, highlighting the history of early Pride marches and LGBTQ protests in Washington D.C. since the 1970s by two accomplished local photographers, leigh h. mosley and Nancy Shia. Mosley's photographs capture key moments from the National 1979 Lesbian and Gay March on Washington, while Shia's capture two different Pride marches on Columbia Road NW in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in the 1980s. This exhibition, and the DC Public Library Art & Exhibits Program, are made possible in part with support from the DC Public Library Foundation.
Visit the library's World Pride web page to learn more about other great Pride events and activities.
About the photographers
leigh h. mosley has been a Washington DC-based freelance photographer, videographer, filmmaker and educator for more than half a century. She has been documenting and creating in Photoshop and Premiere, political images and montages of the Black and Gay communities for decades. She has shot stills and video footage for several short gay feature films, WHUT-TV, the Rainbow History Project and the Audrey Lorde biographical film: A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995). Currently she is developing a documentary of interviews with eleven 70+ Black Lesbian leaders in the DMV (District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia) who have made substantial contributions to the LGBTQIA+ and Black communities for the past 40-50 years.
Nancy Shia has been a photographer of marginalized people and people's movements for almost sixty years - fifty-two and a half of those years in Washington, DC and fifty years in the Adams Morgan neighborhood. She has images of the antiwar movement of the 60s and 70s, the people's movements from South and Central Americas from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the movement for gay rights, LGBTQ rights and trans rights from the 1970s through today, and the movements for civil rights, Black Lives Matter, and housing rights–to name a few of the many people's movements she has covered throughout the years. She has used her images in testimony in DC City Council to help affect positive change, especially in housing legislation. Shia also participates in public art projects, organizing spontaneous exhibitions with other photographers on fences and walls in her neighborhood. She has photographs in a permanent installation at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library and in the Smithsonian Museum of the American Latino. Shia has a Masters in Social Work from Columbia University School of Social Work and a Juris Doctor from Antioch Law School.
Photo Credits:
Above Left: Leigh Mosley, Black and gay marchers take over the streets of Georgia Avenue Northwest with hundreds marching towards the White House, October 14, 1979 ©leigh h. mosley
Above Right: Nancy Shia, Roller skaters in Pride parade on Columbia Road NW, 1983 © Nancy Shia
Below: Leigh Mosely, Portrait by Celeste Crenshaw; Nancy Shia, Self-portrait
