Magdalene "Leni" Sinclair (née Arndt; March 8, 1940) is an American photographer and radical political activist.
Magdalene Arndt was born on March 8, 1940, in Königsberg, Germany,[1] later renamed Kaliningrad when it became territory of the Soviet Union.
She grew up in the village of Vahldorf near Magdeburg in East Germany where she listened to American jazz artists such as Harry Belafonte, Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald on Radio Luxemburg.
In 1964, she met poet and jazz critic John Sinclair, and with 14 other people, they founded the Detroit Artists Workshop on November 1, 1964.
Arndt began photographing jazz musicians performing in Detroit, including John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Yusuf Lateef.
[4] In October 1965, the Detroit Artists Workshop was raided by 25 police officers, and six people, including Sinclair's husband John, were arrested on marijuana charges.
Released on bail, he set out with Leni and Grimshaw to reorganize the workshop into Trans-Love Energies Unlimited, named after a lyric in a Donovan song.
The event was peaceful for most of the day, but after members of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club beat a man, a riot started.
In 2013, Sinclair received a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation for a one-year project to create a public archive of the previously "disorganized negatives"[5] of 57,000 photos of the Detroit music scene that she has taken over a half century period.