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

We AIM to reschedule this event in the future.

AGBS is pleased to announce “Carla Williams: Making Tender,” a public lecture with artist and art historian Carla Williams. Williams will discuss her recent monograph, Tender, a collection of self-portraits Williams made in private between 1984 and 1999 during her undergraduate and graduate studies. Experimenting with large format and Polaroid cameras, Williams drew her camerawork and poses from the histories and cultures of fine-art photography and soft-core pornography. Wrangling these male-driven, heterosexual visual cultures to seek out the possibilities of her own self-portraiture as a young queer Black woman, Williams kept these efforts to herself after she graduated. She continued to explore representations of Black women in the history of photography in her germinal work as an historian, curator, and archivist—work that includes such groundbreaking texts as The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (with Deborah Willis, 2002)—and only recently returned to her self-portraits to create Tender (2023). Winner of the prestigious Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Award, Tender offers “an artist in tender commune with her younger self, by someone who has committed much of their artistic practice to advocating for Black women’s visibility and representational politics,” as PhotoBook Award juror Renée Mussai describes.

Join us to hear Williams discuss the making of Tender, followed by a discussion with photography historian Natalie Zelt and audience Q&A.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

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

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