In “Posing Beauty” — now on view at Northwest African American Museum in Seattle until September — curator and NYU Tisch Department of Photography & Imaging chair Deborah Willis poses questions about beauty, authenticity and who gets to decide how African Americans are depicted. The exhibition includes works by current faculty Bayeté Ross Smith and alums Ifetayo Adbus-Salam ('06), Petrushka Bazin ('04), and Hank Willis Thomas ('98).
From the May 3, 2016 article in The Seattle Times by Gayle Clemans:
The motto “black is beautiful” was widely proclaimed in the 1960s as a declaration of pride, self-love, admiration and activism.
Photographer and New York University professor Deborah Willis extends this idea backward and forward in time in a stunning exhibition of photographs from the 1890s to the present at Northwest African American Museum.
Willis’ deft curatorial choices insist that we consider both words of the exhibition’s title: “Posing Beauty.” Beautifully crafted photographs of stylish, powerful or just downright attractive men and women — and an exhibition layout that disrupts easy chronological or thematic readings — give us the opportunity to think about beauty as poses and positionings, either culturally imposed or self-defined points of view.
Click here to read the full article.
UPDATE:
The Posing Beauty exhibition was also featured in a May 10, 2016 article in the Seattle Globalist.