AGBS regrets to announce that this program is canceled due to unforseen circumstances.

We AIM to reschedule this event in the future.

“Making History: A Seminar with Carla Williams” is a seminar with University of Texas graduate students and faculty, and community scholars, and artist and art historian Carla Williams.

Knitting together artmaking, collections stewardship, writing, and activism, Williams holds a transformative presence in the history of photography. Williams’ contributions include her co-authorship of the groundbreaking The Black Female Body: A Photographic History with Deborah Willis (2002) and her recent artist’s book, Tender (2023). In The Black Female Body, Williams and Willis assembled 165+ photographs of Black women from old and out-of-print books, assorted archives and private collections, and museums across Europe and the United States. Including works by photographers of diverse identities—from well-known artists like Adrian Piper, Carrie Mae Weems, Catherine Opie, and Walker Evans, to anonymous makers creating images for anthropological and/or pornographic use—The Black Female Body makes visible the complex politics of Black female representation in art and visual culture.

At the seminar, attendees may expect a free-flowing discussion about the process of recovering, interpreting, and illuminating the history of Black women and photography, the pleasures and challenges of working with varied collections and institutions, and the creative and innovative archival methods such histories require, among other topics.

This program is supported by a grant from The Mellon Foundation’s Affirming Multivocal Humanities initiative.

This program is open to UT faculty, graduate students, and community scholars. To inquire about available seats, email joy.scanlon@austin.utexas.edu.