VALS Spring 2016

Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Professor Willis and has an affiliated appointment as University Professor with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies also at NYU. Professor Willis has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Fletcher, and MacArthur fellowships, the Infinity Award in Writing from the International Center for Photography, and recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation Award. Named one of the “100 Most Important People in Photography” by American Photography magazine she is one of the nation’s leading historians of African American photography and curators of African American culture. Willis’s books include Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, with Barbara Krauthamer, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, and many others.

Her newest book, Out [o] Fashion Photography: Embracing Beauty was released by the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Press, and a co-authored project, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery, was released by Temple University Press. Among her other notable projects are Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers – 1840 to the Present, A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and African American Portraits of Progress, The Black Female Body in Photography, Let Your Motto be Resistance, and Obama: the Historic Campaign in Photographs. This fall, Dr. Willis curated the traveling exhibition Posing Beauty in African American Culture, which was based on her book Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890’s to the Present and has been on tour in the United States for four years. Michelle Obama, The First Lady in Photographs received the 2010 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work Biography/Autobiography. Professor Willis lives in New York.

See more about Professor Willis here.

Drawing from her wide-ranging interests and research into subjects including literature, mythology, cinema, anthropology, evolutionary biology, religion and history, Camille Henrot’s work acutely reconsiders the typologies of objects and established systems of knowledge. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian resulted in her film “Grosse Fatigue,” a benchmark work for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. Developing on themes from the film, Henrot’s exhibition “The Pale Fox” was first shown at London’s Chisenhale Gallery in 2014 and travelled to Kunsthal Char¬lottenburg, Copenhagen, Bétonsalon, Paris, and the Westfällischer Kunstverein, Munster.

Henrot has forthcoming exhibitions scheduled at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and Fon¬dazione Memmo, Rome. She has had one-person exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris; and Jeu de Paume, Paris. She has exhibited in group shows at Centre Pompidou, Paris; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Stedelijk Museum, Netherlands; and SculptureCenter, New York. Camille Henrot participated in Prospect 3, New Orleans and the 2014 Taipei and Gwangju Biennials. She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam Jun Paik Award.

She speaks on Grosse Fatigue here.

Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009).

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York City. He was born in Santiago de Chile.

Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel, London; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. A major retrospective of his work took place in summer 2012 at three institutions in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V. and Alte Nationalgalerie. In 2014 the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki hosted the most extensive retrospective of his career.

Jaar has realized more than sixty public interventions around the world. More than fifty monographic publications have been published about his work.

He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000.

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York, the MCA in Chicago, MOCA and LACMA in Los Angeles, the Tate in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Centro Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlaebeck and dozens of other institutions and private collections worldwide.

More information here

Leigh Ledare (born 1976, Seattle, Washington) uses photography, archival material, text and film to explore human agency, social relationships, taboos and the photographic in equal turns. Through a wide span of artistic practices, Ledare examines issues related to desire, identity, and morality.

Ledare first gained recognition through his exhibition and artist book titled “Pretend You’re Actually Alive” (2000-2008), which examines the complex relations between the artist and his mother – namely, how she used intimacy, eroticism, and vulnerability to negotiate the balance of power within the family. The resulting images are often sumptuous, saturated with color, and surprisingly beautiful. But they also, and importantly, disconcert the viewer, making us uncomfortable, and, in the process, raising questions about the functioning of the image and the construction of subjectivity in contemporary culture. Ledare has continued this examination into personal relationships with works that’s feature images of his collectors, patrons, and ex-wife, often in sexual situations.

In 2009, Ledare was included in an exhibition “Ça Me Touche” curated by Nan Goldin in Arles France as part of the annual Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. Writing in the New York Times, Roberta Smith said that Ledare is “taking us deep into the darkness and torment that drive many artists.” In the series “Personal Commissions” Ledare “answered personal ads from women whose desires echoed those of his mother’s, and paid them to photograph him in their apartments, in a scenario of their choosing.”

Read more about his controversial body of work “Pretend You’re Actually Alive” here.