Deborah Willis

This project became available online in 1995 as "The Cemetery." The site was an attempt to provide access to my earliest artworks that addressed history, memory, and memorial within the African American community. In the late 1990's the web project evolved to include a wider range of works and the project title became "Small Towns, Black Lives." To coincide with a large survey exhibition and the publication of the book version of the project, I created the final version of the web project in 2002. "The photographs in Wendel White¹s Small Towns, Black Lives are the kinds of hybrids Lange described and anticipated in her statement. The exhibition and book form a personal album revealing the layers of meaning and history that he carefully uncovered. His project to document African American communities in southern New Jersey began in much the same way that many photographers before him had set out to record a place or people." "Neither stridently documentary nor self-consciously arty, White¹s images straddle two worlds. They adopt the cool reserve of certain recent fine art photographers ­ Lewis Baltz, for example. Yet he is also true to the sincere lens of many of photography¹s great documentarians‹such as Lange or Jacob Riis, who documented the horrid slum conditions in New York¹s Lower East Side or Lewis Hine, who took part in the influential Farm Security Administration documentary project from 1937 to 1942. White has produced a body of work that is uniquely personal and profoundly informative. His photographs thoughtfully ask us to look without preconceptions at the history he has uncovered." -- Charles Ashley Stainback, Curator.

"Reflections in Black, the first comprehensive history of black photographers, is Deborah Willis's assemblage of photographs of African American life from 1840 to the present. Willis, a curator of photography at the Smithsonian Institution, has selected nearly 600 photographs, with 487 in duotone and 81 in full color, of which more than 100 images have never before been seen. We are given rich, moving glimpses of African American life, from the last generation of slaves to the urban pioneers of the great migrations of the 1920s, from rare antebellum daguerreotypes of freemen to the courtly celebrants of the Harlem Renaissance, from civil rights martyrs to postmodern photographic artists of the 1990s."--BOOK JACKET.

"A visual testimony of the black community through the photographer as witness, documenter, artist and recorder"--Back cover

Caldecott Honor artist Faith Ringgold takes readers on an unforgettable journey through the Harlem Renaissance when Lonnie and his uncle Bates go back to Harlem in the 1920s. Along the way, they meet famous writers, musicians, artists, and athletes, from Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois to Josephine Baker and Zora Neale Hurston and many more, who created this incredible period. And after an exciting day of walking with giants, Lonnie fully understands why the Harlem Renaissance is so important.

"As a young South African woman of about twenty, Saartjie Baartman, the so-called "Hottentot Venus," was brought to London and placed on exhibit in 1810. Clad in the Victorian equivalent of a body stocking, and paraded through the streets and on stage in a cage she became a human spectacle in London and Paris. Baartman's distinctive physique became the object of ridicule, curiosity, scientific inquiry, and desire until and after her premature death. The figure of Sarah Baartman was reduced to her sexual parts. Black Venus 2010 traces Baartman's memory in our collective histories, as well as her symbolic history in the construction and identity of black women as artists, performers, and icons. The wide-ranging essays, poems, and images in Black Venus 2010 represent some of the most compelling responses to Baartman. Each one grapples with the enduring legacy of this young African woman who forever remains a touchstone for black women."--Pub. desc.

Visual Journal celebrates the work of five African American photographers who documented segregated black communities in Washington, D.C., rural Virginia, and New York City in the 1930s and 1940s. These photographers - Robert H. McNeill, Gordon Parks, Robert S. Scurlock, Morgan and Marvin Smith - produced extraordinary images that recover today the fullness of African American life in the years when it remained little noticed by the larger society. The work presented in Visual Journal, executed between 1929 and 1949, captures the rhythms of daily commerce and societybaptisms, picnics, business meetings, cotillions, and sports events. Ranging from dynamic shots of street scenes to stylized studio portraiture, the photographs portray how the Depression, the New Deal, Jim Crow laws, the Great Migration, and the Second World War affected black families and community relationships. As if they were contemporary griots retelling their communities' stories, these photographers recorded African Americans engaging in acts of devotion and conflict, rejoicing in efforts to "uplift the race," and maintaining dignity in a so-called separate but equal society. Visual Journal not only pays tribute to the photographers' versatility and talent but also offers valuable insight into the creative community life that flourished despite the strictures of segregation.

As the world prepared for the Exposition Universalle de 1900 in Paris, W.E.B. Du Bois was approached to help represent African American life. He came with a cache of stunning photographs to illustrate the progress of Negroes in America-thereby offering a photographic counterpoint to the prolific stereotyping of blacks that left viewers awestruck. With insights from Pulitzer Prize winner David Levering Lewis and Mac-Arthur Fellow photo historian Deborah Willis, A Small Nation of People presents more than one hundred and fifty of these important photographs together for the first time since their initial unveiling. Here is an incredible treasure trove of illustrations of African Americans in front of their new businesses, universities, and homes-sometimes modest, sometimes elegant. Here, too, are beautiful Victorian-era portraits of blacks whose varied hues show how diverse black Americans truly were. Viewed together, the collection reveals in glorious detail what Du Bois saw-a small nation of people prepared to make their mark on America.

254 pages ; 22 cm

Celebrate the legacy of the African-American family through photographs by the best black photographers - past and present. As the anniversary of the Million Man March draws near, these photographs symbolize the commitment to family and community made in Washington, D.C., in October 1995. The moving text by Michael Cottman explores the families of men who participated in the March and examines how their lives and commitments have been strengthened and affirmed by that. Empowering experience. This book is a testimonial to the grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers, cousins and children who are the black family of America today.

"Here, collected for the first time, are Willis' one-of-a kind photo quilts, her personal photo essays, and her critical essays about the vital contribution African American photographers made and continue to make to the advancement of photography in this country. Willis shows that not only did photographers like J. P. Ball and Gordon Parks advance the techniques of the medium, but through their work documenting the lives of blacks in America they changed the way blacks were portrayed - and so thought of - in this country. For anybody interested in photography, black history, or personal expression, this book is important. For anyone interested in all three, Family History Memory is essential."--BOOK JACKET.

Willis (photography, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) has assembled an exhilarating collection of black & white photographs in this handsome oversize volume that celebrates Black culture.

Question Bridge assembles a series of questions posed to black men, by and for other black men, along with the corresponding responses and portraits of the participants. The questions range from the comic to the sublimely philosophical: from "Am I the only one who has problems eating chicken, watermelon, and bananas in front of white people?" to "Why is it so difficult for black American men in this culture to be themselves, their essential selves, and remain who they truly are?" The answers tackle the issues that continue to surround black male identity today in a uniquely honest, no-holds-barred manner. While the ostensible subject is black men, the conversation that evolves in these pages is ultimately about the nature of living in a post-Obama, post-Ferguson, post-Voting Rights Act America. Question Bridge is about who we are and what we mean to one another. Most critically, it asks: how can we start to dismantle the myths and misconceptions that have evolved around race and gender in America—and how can we reset the narrative about ourselves, just as #blacklivesmatter has reset the narrative of civil protest? Question Bridge: Black Males was originally created by Chris Johnson in 1996, the project was revived by Hank Willis Thomas, Kamal Sinclair, and Bayeté Ross Smith who filmed over 150 black men in nine American cities. This content was used to create a five-screen video installation that has been exhibited at over thirty-five institutions, including the Brooklyn Museum; Oakland Museum of California; Birmingham Museum of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago; Exploratorium, San Francisco; Missouri History Museum, St. Louis; Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts+Culture, Charlotte, NC; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; and New Frontier exhibition at Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah. The Question Bridge Project includes various platforms, an interactive website and mobile app, as well as community roundtable conversations and a curriculum designed for high school learners. The founding artists, along with contributions from Ambassador Andrew Young, Jesse Williams, Rashid Shabazz, and Delroy Lindo, will introduce and contextualize the body of the work and provide closing remarks on our current and future social climate.