Opening Reception September 4, 2025 5:30 – 8:00 pm On View September 4 – December 21, 2025. The Center for Black Visual Culture and The Department of Photography & Imaging Tisch School of the Arts invite you to celebrate the opening reception of Reflections in Black: A Reframing. Curated by Dr. Deborah Willis, this group photography exhibition accompanies the release of the 25th anniversary edition of Willis’ internationally acclaimed publication Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present; the first comprehensive history of black photographers.
Join the Center for Black Visual Culture as we welcome our Fall 2025 Artist-Scholar in Residence, dream hampton. dream hampton is an award-winning filmmaker and writer from Detroit. For three decades her essays and cultural criticism helped shape a generation. Her most recent works include the award winning short film “Freshwater” (NYT OpDocs/PBS, 2023) and “Ladies First” (Netflix, 2023). In 2019 she was showrunner and Executive Producer of the Emmy nominated docuseries, “Surviving R. Kelly” (Netflix), which broke ratings records and earned her a Peabody Award.
1954 – 2025. It is with a heavy heart that the NYU community shares news of the unexpected passing of our beloved Professor Michael D. Dinwiddie. So many students came to know Professor Dinwiddie as a brilliant teacher, adviser, artist, and historian.
1934 – 2025. Raymond Saunders, a belatedly recognized Bay Area artist who decried the art world’s tendency to pigeonhole Black artists by race even as he produced paintings that actively explored racial subjects, passed away just a few days after his first retrospective at a major museum, in Pittsburgh. “Can’t we get clear of these degrading limitations,” he wrote, “and recognize the wider reality of art where color is the means and not the end?”
1993 – 2025. Mamy Tall, the celebrated Senegalese architect, designer, and cultural visionary known for reshaping the narrative of African cities, has passed away. A radiant force in West African design, Tall co-founded Dakar Lives, a digital platform spotlighting Senegal’s urban culture, and established Weex Tall, a multidisciplinary studio merging architecture, photography, fashion, and heritage.
1970 – 2025. Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who rose to fame as a teenager playing Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show,” passed away. Mr. Warner acted in dozens of television shows, directed episodes of television series, appeared in plays, wrote poetry and performed music as a bass player among his many accomplishments.
1941 – 2025. When Boston artist and social activist Dana Chandler Jr. passed away, he left not only the legacy of his art. He created an institution in 1978 that also lives on: the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP), in affiliation with Northeastern University (NEU).
Alex Greenberger, ARTnews. In February, nine curators received handwritten letters from the artist Betye Saar, who turned 99. A legendary artist known for her assemblages attesting to histories of racism and survival in the face of it, Saar thanked the curators for their engagement with her work, then asked if they would help her look forward by helping create a “resource for future generations—curators, researchers, writers, and art historians—helping them connect with the heart of my practice.”
Elizabeth Blair, NPR. Artist Amy Sherald is canceling an upcoming show of her work at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Sherald’s boldly colored portraits documenting the African American experience have graced magazine covers.
McNally Jackson. Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writer’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writer’s creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond.