This Thursday Light Work invites you to join us for a major Syracuse Symposium event, which looks at the depiction of African and African American beauty in the media. Internationally renowned photographers Deborah Willis and Carrie Mae Weems will engage in a special conversation titled Posing Beauty, taken from an exhibition and book by the same name, both organized and written by Willis.
  
"This event will focus on the representation of African and African American beauty in a variety of historical and contemporary contexts," explains Gregg Lambert, Dean's Professor of the Humanities, as well as founding director of the SU Humanities Center and principal investigator of the Andrew W. Mellon Central New York Humanities Corridor. "Both speakers are visual storytellers whose work is rooted in memory, history and representation. Their message will surely transcend artistic and racial boundaries."
 
Most of the evening will draw on Posing Beauty, an acclaimed traveling exhibition of 80 works of black-and-white, color, and digitalized photographs; video installations; and Web-based projects, all from private and public collections. Willis says the exhibition, which inspired the book, looks at beauty and art in the media and in various forms of popular culture. She explains, "The exhibition questions the relationship between beauty and art by examining the representation of beauty and different attitudes about class, gender and aesthetics."

 

Willis serves as university professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imagining at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Weems,  one of more than two dozen photographers featured in the Posing Beauty book and exhibition, is an award-winning visual artist, folklorist and storyteller, she describes her work as "socially engaging," covering political, cultural and social terrain.

 

This event is sponsored by Syracuse Symposium, Light Work, and the Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies.