opening in 2009

Posing Beauty in African American Culture

Organized by the Grey Art Gallery, NYU, Deborah Willis, Curator

Posing Beauty explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty have been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the Internet. Throughout the Western history of art and image-making, beauty has been idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and art has become increasingly complex within contemporary art and popular culture. This exhibit challenges the relationship between beauty and art by examining the representation of beauty as a racialized act fraught with meanings and attitudes about class, gender, and aesthetics.

The first of four thematic sections, Constructing a Pose, considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, Body and Image, questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last two sections, Objectivity vs. Subjectivity, and Codes of Beauty, invite a deeper reading of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves.

Posing Beauty explores contemporary understandings of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts. This exhibit features approximately 125 works drawn from public and private collections and will be accompanied by a book published by W.W. Norton. Artists in the exhibit include, among others, James VanDerZee, Carrie Mae Weems, Eve Arnold, F. Holland Day, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, Seydou Keita, Joy Gregory, Sheila Pree, Lorna Simpson, Renee Cox, Weegee, Anthony Barboza, Gordon Parks, Doris Ulmann, Arnold Newman, Bruce Davidson, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, and Walker Evans.

Renee Cox, Baby Back, 2001, archival digital c-print on aluminum, 115 x 144 inches. Courtesy of the artist.