Deborah Willis
American • b. 1948
Biography
As an artist, author, curator and preeminent historian of African American photography, Deborah Willis's art and pioneering research has focused on cultural histories envisioning the black body, women and gender. Photography is embedded in her DNA – her father was a photographer, as is her son, the conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas.
Insights
Selected honors: Susan Koppelman Award (2011); John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (2005); The Studio Museum in Harlem Award for Achievement in Scholarship (2001); MacArthur Fellow (2000); Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation (1996)
"Throughout the history of art and image-making, beauty as an aesthetic impulse has been simultaneously idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and identity has become increasingly complex within contemporary art and popular culture. My work challenges the relationship between beauty and desire by examining the representation of fashion and reinvention."
Past Lots
50
Deborah Willis
Hortense's Mirror
Estimate On Request
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