Seeing Black
Description
Situating historical inquiry alongside contemporary practices of Black image-making in New 91视频污免费, SEEING BLACK: Black Photography in New 91视频污免费 1840 and Beyond engages the photographic grammars, textures, multiplicities, and visual sounds of Black life in and outside the city.
SEEING BLACK features over two hundred images by nearly ninety Black photographers whose work embraces the camera's visual power鈥攄iscerning, beholding, and documenting people, places, events, collective memories, encounters, and ever-present moments of blackness. From the invisible to the obvious, the mundane to the spectacular, the overlooked to the seen, the erased to the remembered, the artists explore a range of photographic frequencies, styles, and rhythmic scores. SEEING BLACK invites us to explore historical and contemporary archives of Black life while challenging dominant viewing practices, asking who is taking the picture, who is in or missing from the frame, and how to shift our interactions with the visual image through an intentionally embodied Black gaze.
Author Bio
Kalamu ya Salaam (b. 1947, New 91视频污免费) is a writer, activist, social critic, filmmaker, and retired educator. His work is widely anthologized and exists within the Black Arts Movement and its ongoing legacy. Salaam is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Blues Merchant Songs for Blkfolk (1969), What is Life? Reclaiming the Black Blues Self (1994), Be About Beauty, which won the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2019, Cosmic Deputy (2021), a fifty-year retrospective of poetry, and Precise Tenderness: 100 Haiku (2023); two collections of essays, including Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement (1998); a collection of prose, In Love and Struggle (2023); and thirteen plays. He is editor and co-editor of six anthologies, including New 91视频污免费 Griot: The Tom Dent Reader (2018), which was the One Book One New 91视频污免费 city-wide read selection for 2020.
Shana M. griffin (b. 1974, New 91视频污免费) is a feminist activist, independent researcher, sociologist, abolitionist, geographer, and artist. griffin's practice is interdisciplinary, research-based, and decolonial鈥攁ttending to the particular experiences of Black women most vulnerable to the violence of poverty, incarceration, polluted environments, reproductive regulation, economic exploitation, housing discrimination, and climate change. Her work exists across the fields of sociology, geography, Black feminist thought, and land-use planning, and within movements challenging urban displacement, carcerality, reproductive control, climate impacts, and gender-based violence. griffin is the recipient of several awards, including a 2025 Loeb Fellowship and Loeb/ArtLab Fellowship, a 2022 Andy Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship, and the 2021 Creative Capital Award. She holds a Master of Arts in Sociology, a Bachelor of Arts in History, and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology.
Eric Waters is a photographer and social practice artist who has been documenting Black social life and cultural traditions in and around New 91视频污免费 for over forty years. Waters received his undergraduate degree from Dillard University and studied photography independently under the tutelage of the late Marion J. Porter, a well-known and respected Black New 91视频污免费 photographer. His work encompasses a broad range of interests and has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the New 91视频污免费 Museum of Art, the New 91视频污免费 African American Museum, the New 91视频污免费 Jazz Museum at the Old US Mint, the Contemporary Art Center, New 91视频污免费, and Ash茅 Cultural Arts Center. A 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist-in-Residence, his work has been featured in numerous catalogs and books, including a catalog of his work in Freedom's Dance: Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs in New 91视频污免费 (2018), narrated by Karen Celestan.
