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.
Black Portraiture[s]: The Black Built Environment will examine the historicity and rich panoply encompassing the Black built environment, both physical and imagined. Exploring the concept and its relationship to photography, architecture, urban planning, and visual culture, artists have reconceived and reconstructed visions of our built environment while exploring themes conversant with the spiritual and ritualistic continuities of the African diaspora.
On June 9th, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Harlem, New York, hosted a book launch and conversation. Award winning biographer A’Lelia Bundles and CBVC Founding Director Dr. Deborah Willis were in conversation about Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance. A vibrant and deeply researched biography of A’Lelia Walker–daughter of Madame C. J. Walker.
Created in 2018 and 2020, Deborah Willis’ series of photographs, Meditation On Joan Baez’s Civil War, Sundays in Harlem and the Clothesline Series, are timely visual frameworks for understanding America’s past, present and future. In these works, Willis captures a past collective memory of conflict that reflects the present day, where the contemporary American political climate holds up a grim resemblance to the ills that gave rise to the Civil War.
In recent decades, art in the public space has become far more dynamic in its presentation, as well as increasingly visible, accessible, and sometimes provocative. What role does public art play in facing the challenges of our times? How can art best aid in building communities, affecting social change, or even resisting oppression? What could be, or should be, the future of public art?
For more than three decades, María Magdalena Campos-Pons has used her body as a vessel in performances, photographs, sculptural installations, collages, and videos. A 2023 winner of the MacArthur “genius” fellowship, the artist has variously addressed motherhood, her family’s transnational heritage, and the hidden histories all around her, using objects and sites in her home country of Cuba to speak to painful generational memories of enslavement that linger on today. Across her multifarious body of work, she shows how the past is embedded in us, the people we hold dear, and the objects we collect.
by Deborah Willis and Kevin Merida. Kamala is a beautiful tribute to Kamala Harris’s remarkable rise from District Attorney in California to her historic presidential run in 2024. Curated by Deborah Willis and Kevin Merida, this visually captivating book features nearly 150 vibrant photographs that capture the joy, challenges, and triumphs of Harris’s campaign. Rather than following a strict timeline, the book is thematically arranged into sections like “Family & Early Life,” “The Ascent,” and “Powerful Rooms.” Each section offers a unique perspective on Harris’s multifaceted life and career, complemented by insightful essays that place this pivotal election in context.
The Venice Biennale has for the first time appointed an African woman as the curator of its contemporary art festival. Swiss-Cameroonian curator Koyo Kouoh has been put in charge of the 61st edition of the Biennale Arte, which will take place in Venice from April to November 2026. Born in 1967 in Cameroon but educated through her teens and twenties in Zurich, Switzerland, Kouoh has since 2019 been executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa, which holds the continent’s largest collection of contemporary art. A self-described “fundamental pan-Africanist”, she was previously the founding artistic director of Raw Material Company, an art centre in Dakar, Senegal.
What is artistic freedom for? How can we express our full selves in times of danger? Hear Glenn Ligon and Solange Knowles discuss their work and their many selves, the expansiveness of the artist, and the multiplicity in us all. In the second season of the podcast with Hauser & Wirth, explore the line where left-brain meets right-brain; where logic ends and creativity begins—beyond the edge of reason. Hosted by Jeff Chang.