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Deborah Willis

Born, 1948 in Philadelphia, USA

For the Transforming the Crown catalogue (1997), Deborah Willis supplied the essay ‘Talking Back: Black Women’s Visual Liberation Through Photography’. Deborah Willis was part of the “Curatorial Debates since the 1980s” panel at the Shades of Black conference, 20 April 2001, Duke University.

Deborah Willis contributed a text - Picturing the New Negro Woman - for the catalogue accompanying the major exhibition Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body, which was curated by Barbara Thompson, curator of African, Oceanic, and Native American Collections at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. The exhibition was originated by Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire and exhibited there April 1 - August 10, 2008 before touring to venues in Wellesley, Massachusetts and San Diego, California.

The exhibition featured contributions by the following artists: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Renée Cox, Sokari Douglas Camp, Angéle Etoundi Essamba, Lalla Assia Essaydi, Emile Guebehi, Senzeni Marasela, Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Hassan Musa, Wangechi Mutu, Ingrid Mwangi/Robert Hutter - IngridMwangiRobertHutter Collective, Magdalene Odundo, Etiyé Dimma Poulsen, Alison Saar, Joyce J. Scott, Berni Searle, Fazal Sheikh, Malick Sidibé, Penny Siopsis, Maud Sulter, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, and Carla Williams.

Apart from Deborah Willis herself, the catalogue featured contributions by the following artists, curators and scholars: Ifi Amadiume, Ayo Abietou Coly, Enid Schildkrout, Christraud Geary, Barbara Thompson, Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, and Carla Williams.

Willis contributed a text, ‘In Search of Beauty: Charles White’s Exposures’, to the catalogue for Charles White: A Retrospective, the first major museum survey devoted to the artist in well over 30 years. The exhibition charted the breadth of Charles White’s career—from the 1930s through to works completed before his death in 1979. Featuring in excess of 100 works, including drawings, paintings, prints, photographs, illustrated books, record covers and archival materials, this was by far the most extensive, well resourced exhibition of the artist’s work ever to take place. Fittingly, it travelled to prominent galleries in the three US cities with which White was associated. Opening at the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition travelled to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, finishing its tour at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This was a weighty, profusely illustrated catalogue, coming as it did with important texts by leading scholars and well known names.