artwomen.org | NWSA Conference, Summer 2000

Deborah Willis is curator of exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution's Center for African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. She received her M.F.A in Art History/Museum Studies from the City University of New York, and her M.F.A in photography from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Willis' dual career as art photographer and historian of African American photography has included positions as exhibitions coordinator and curator of photography and prints at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture; and her current position. She has lectured extensively on African American photographers. Her own work has also been exhibited widely, including a solo exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona; Searching for Memories: Black Women and the 1895 Exposition at the Atlanta Arts Festival; and Eye of the Beholder: Photographers from the Avon Collection at the International Center for Photography in New York. Willis has been awarded several honors and fellowships including a MacArthur Fellowship (1999), the Pratt Institute Alumni Achievement Award in Education, and the International Center for Photography Infinity Award for writing on photography. She is currently at work on a book that explores photographic images of the Black female body.

NWSA Conference Abstract

Note: Deborah Willis was unable to present at the roundtable because of activities related to receiving a MacArthur Fellowship award.

"My work focuses on the visual image of the Black. I explore through text and images how images have served to create a constructed understanding of the Black female body based on appearance. I have for some time referenced my own family in my artwork by making photographs, photo quilts and installations about their lives. I used photographs and family albums, as well as my own photographs, to make constructed and fabricated histories about Black women and women in general. I link the historical past with my own personal history. In doing that I become the storyteller, the spectator, and the artist.

In my latest work on the female body builder what I am trying to do is focus on the female body, contextualized and situated in the present, pointing to how work is manifested physically in the Black female body, shorn of covering and developed and amplified in muscles and tendons, shoulders and calves. The depiction of physical work and its impact on the development of the body has oftentimes been relegated to men and this, the work of physical work, is constructed as one that is gender specific. This recent series attempts to speak to that notion, and the Black female body, if viewed under the lens of actual work, deconstructs and reconfigures the image of women, pointing to literal strength and not figurative, emotionally specific moments.

The five minute presentation will include slides of my work as well as 19th century images of Saartjie Baartman, 'the Hottentot Venus,' and 20th century images of Josephine Baker, and I will discuss the works of Carrie Mae Weems, Carla Williams, and Lorna Simpson."

NWSA CONFERENCE, SUMMER 2000 MAIN PAGE

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