FEATURED SPEAKER

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Deborah Willis:  Imaging Social Movements in America from Emancipation to Black Life Matters

Wednesday, August 2, 6:00pm

University of New Mexico Art Museum, in partnership with CENTER, presents a lecture with photo historian, curator and author Deborah Willis.

Images, whether artistic, documentary, or anthropological, are forever fixed in the popular imagination through photography. From the medium’s beginning, race and gender have shaped and controlled the reception of photographic portraits, both politically and aesthetically. Photographers from the 19th to today respond to their own lives and their communities in similar ways. They comment on politics, culture, family, community, and history from internal and external points of view.  This talk focuses on the abilities the photograph, the Internet and digital media provide us about the circulation of movement/activist imagery. This lecture will include works by image makers and change makers who are actively involved in changing the course of contemporary visual culture.

Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at New York University/Tisch and has an affiliated appointment in Africana Studies. Professor Willis was a 2014 Richard D. Cohen Fellow of African and African American Art History at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University, a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. Professor Willis has received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her co-authored book  “Envisioning Emancipation.”   Other notable projects include “Framing Beauty: Intimate Moments,“ “Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present;”  “Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present;” “Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs,” a NAACP Image Award Literature Winner, and “Black Venus 2010: They Called Her ‘Hottentot.’”

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