Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985
Friday, December 12th on Zoom • 1pm EST • 6pm BST
Event held via Zoom • Registration Link
Photography Network membership is required to attend.
Please join us on December 12 at 1pm to hear from the curators of Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955-1985. This exhibition at the National Gallery of Art is the first show to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty. This expansive exhibition presents 150 examples connecting photography with the Black Arts Movement from its roots to its lingering impacts, from 1955 to 1985. During this program, curators Philip Brookman and Deborah Willis will present an overview of the exhibition and accompanying catalogue, offering insights into the artists, ideas, and historical contexts that shaped this pivotal era.
About the speakers:
Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship and is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. She has received awards from the College Art Association for Writing Art History in 2021, the Outstanding Service Award from the Royal Photographic Society in the UK and the 2022 Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art. She is the author/co-author of several books including Photography and the Black Arts Movement, Reflections in Black A Reframing, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Home: Reimagining Interiority" at YoungArts, Miami, "Framing Moments in the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts", "Migrations and Meanings in Art", and "Free at they want to be: Artists Committed to Memory".
Philip Brookman is consulting curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. There he has organized Dorothea Lange: Seeing People, Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 and Intersections: Photographs and Videos from the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He also edited the recent book Gordon Parks: The New Tide, Early Work 1940–1950 with the National Gallery of Art, The Gordon Parks Foundation, and Steidl. Brookman was chief curator and head of research, senior curator of photography and media arts, as well as curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art between 1993 and 2014. He organized or co-organized many projects there, including exhibitions on Eadweard Muybridge, Hank Willis Thomas, Taryn Simon, Sally Mann, Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Jim Goldberg, Gilles Peress, Larry Sultan, and Danny Lyon.