Kwame Brathwaite (born in Brooklyn, New York, 1938) is represented
by Philip Martin in Los Angeles. Beginning in the early 1960s,
Brathwaite photographed stories for black publications such as the
New York Amsterdam News , City Sun , and Daily Challenge , helping
set the stage for the Black Arts and Black Power movements. By the
1970s, Brathwaite was one of the era's top concert photographers,
shaping the images of such public figures as Stevie Wonder, Bob
Marley, James Brown, and Muhammad Ali. Recent acquirers of
Brathwaite's work include the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum
of American Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Frances
Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.
Tanisha C. Ford (essay) is associate professor of Africana studies
and history at the University of Delaware. She is the author of
Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of
Soul (2015), which won the 2016 Organization of American
Historians' Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for best book on civil
rights history. She was featured in Aperture 's Fall 2017 issue,
"Elements of Style," among many other publications. Ford is a
cofounder of TEXTURES, a pop-up material culture lab, creating and
curating content on fashion and the built environment.
Deborah Willis (essay) is an artist, writer, and curator, as well
as professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging
at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She has been a
Richard D. Cohen Fellow of African and African American Art History
at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University (2014), a Guggenheim
Fellow (2005), a Fletcher Fellow (2005), and a MacArthur Fellow
(2000). Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her
coauthored book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the
End of Slavery (2013).
“From Beyoncé to Barack Obama, it’s hard to think of a black figure
who does not owe their prominence, in some measure, to the ethos of
‘Black is Beautiful’” —Ekow Eshun, Financial Times
"The Brooklyn-born photographer spent his career working to elevate
natural black beauty during a time when the fashion industry was
resistant." —the Guardian
“Together, the exhibition and the monograph are important footnotes
to a slogan that has become both a state of mind and a
revolutionary movement.” —Hyperallergic
“Through Brathwaite’s delicate and compassionate eye, the black
female form, unadulterated in appearance, gave a new visual
language that helped heal centuries-old white-supremacist wounds.
The Grandassa models were an idealization of a black female utopia,
which reinvigorated a limitless Africa that carried all the
dialects, languages, accents, and subcultures within one womb.
Brathwaite did not depict the black woman as what she could be, but
as what she had always been, her beauty a constant and not
something to be fixed.” —Morgan Jerkins, Artsy
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