Bev Grant

Osmos is pleased to present Bev Grant: Photographs from Cuba, 1969, an exhibition of Bev Grant’s photography from her visit to Cuba for the tenth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution in January 1969.

In 1969, alongside other alternative media personnel from the United States, Grant was selected as a representative for the radical filmmaking collective Newsreel to travel to Cuba and photograph the island. She documented the impacts of the Cuban Revolution on the culture, education, and landscape of the country. Grant captured moments such as Fidel Castro speaking at Revolution Square, visits to schools created to increase children’s literacy rates in rural areas, the Moncada Barracks, the site of the July 26, 1953 attack on the Batista regime often described as the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, and excursions to farms along the countryside. With the current oil embargo and the indictment of Cuba’s government by the United States government, these images acquire new currency and meaning.

The exhibition is a testament to Bev Grant’s lifelong commitment to social justice and activism that began in the 1960s as an active participant and documentarian rather than a passive observer. A selection of these images has been published in the book Bev Grant Photography: 1968-1972, published by OSMOS Books in 2021.

Bev Grant (b. 1942) is a labor and social activist, feminist, singer-songwriter, photographer and filmmaker raised in Portland, Oregon, and based in Brooklyn. From 1967 to 1972 she was a member of Newsreel and worked closely with the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords Party, and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In 1967, she was a co-founder of NY Radical Women and in 1968 of W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell). Grant has had solo exhibitions at OSMOS in New York City (2018), the Old Stone House in Brooklyn (2022), the Cooley Gallery at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (2022), the American Labor Museum in Haledon, New Jersey (2022), and she was the focus of the exhibition Dissident Sisters: Bev Grant and Feminist Activism, 1968-1972 at the Block Museum at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois (2024). A solo exhibition of Grant's photographs from Cuba is forthcoming at Institute 193 in Lexington, KY in 2027. Her images have appeared in numerous books and publications, including The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Times. She is the subject of a newly released documentary entitled Bev Grant – A Lifetime of Liberation by Agitator Index, which premiered at the 2025 Workers Unite Film Festival in New York.