Essence magazine interviewed department chair Dr. Deb Willis about the recent exhibition of photographs she curated for Posing Beauty. The traveling exhibition can now be see at Northwest African American Museum in Seattle, WA.
From the June 8, 2016 article by Lyndsay Green:
When multihyphenate artist and scholar Deborah Willis, Ph.D. recognized that African-Americans were often being left out of historical conversations about beauty, she took action, penning Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009). But her mission of sharing the collection of striking photos of Black beauties over the course of history didn't end there. The author, photographer-curator, professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, sought to transfer the pages of the wildly popular coffee table book to the walls of art galleries across the country.