Most people who have walked into a bookstore in the past 15 years have likely seen the picture: a Black woman wearing a formal midcentury suit and a toothy smile, standing with her hands on her hips in a jaunty pose.
The black-and-white image is of Henrietta Lacks, a Baltimore woman whose cells were collected without her knowledge or consent and became central to decades of scientific research. The photograph, prominently featured on the cover of the bestselling book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” has become an iconic image of Lacks – and of the complicated history of race, medicine and genetics in America.
St. Louis-based artist and curator Sydney Oreoluwa has reimagined that photograph in a painting now featured in “A Blueprint of Us,” an exhibition at the Luminary art space on Cherokee Street…