Honors college to host Leni Sinclair
“No other photographer has so well captured the intense, creative, high-energy spirit and times of Detroit in the 1960s and ‘70s.” —Carey Loren
Leni Sinclair fled from communist East Germany when she was 18 years old and made her way to Detroit, Michigan, where she enrolled at Wayne State University. In 1964, Sinclair co-founded the Detroit Artists Workshop and began photographing avant-garde jazz artists such as Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and countless others. A few years later, with her then husband John Sinclair, they found themselves at the epicenter of the Detroit rock scene working at the Grande Ballroom and promoting the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges; a montage of her photography served as the cover for the MC5’s famous first release, “Kick Out the Jams.” A few years later she and John, in support of the Black Panthers, formed the White Panther Party where she served as the Minister of Education. When John was subsequently jailed for giving two marijuana cigarettes to an undercover policeman, Leni, aided by the assistance of John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and countless others, staged the “Ten for Two” rally in support of John’s release. Throughout these years Leni also served as a historian and preserved the archives of these activities; these documents were subsequently bequeathed as the “John and Leni Sinclair Papers” to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan.
Her intense love for music led Leni to photograph literally thousands of musicians from the 60s to the present, covering jazz, blues, rock, reggae, African music and more. Leni Sinclair’s historically iconic photos have appeared in countless newspapers, magazines, books, LP and CD covers. In 2009, Leni had her first major museum exhibit at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. In 2012 she and Gary Grimshaw published Detroit Rocks!, a collection of her photographs and Grimshaw’s equally iconic posters spanning the years from the Detroit Artists Workshop and the White Panther Party.