Exhibition will be on View from January 31 – June 4, 2023
Deborah Willis is the curator of Posing Beauty in African American Culture, which was put on by the Pasadena, California-based Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions. Jade Powers, curator of contemporary art, put together the display at the Harn.
Posing Beauty in African American Culture explores the contested ways that African and African American beauty have been portrayed in historical and modern contexts through a variety of media, including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture like music and the Internet. Throughout the history of Western art and image-making, beauty has been idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and art has become increasingly complex within contemporary art and popular culture. Posing Beauty explores contemporary understandings of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class and gender within art, popular culture and political contexts.
The first of three thematic sections, “Constructing a Pose,” considers the interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-representation and imposed representation, and the relationship between subject and photographer. The second theme, “Body & Image,” questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The final theme, “Modeling Beauty & Beauty Contests,” invites us to reflect upon the ambiguities of beauty, its impact on mass culture and individuals, and how the display of beauty affects the ways in which we see and interpret the world and ourselves.
About 120 pieces of artwork are included in Posing Beauty, which features the work of more than 45 artists and photographers, including, among others, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Anthony Barboza, Sheila Pree Bright, Renee Cox, Victor Diop, Leonard Freed, Charles “Teenie” Harris, Dave Heath, Lauren Kelley, John W. Mosley, Ken Ramsay, Jeffrey Scales, Stephen Shames, Mickalene Thomas, Carrie Mae We.
Dr. M.F. “Midge” Smith, Ken and Laura Berns, Visit Gainesville, Alachua County, David Etherington and Jeffery Dunn, Eric and Yvette Godet, HCA Florida North Florida Hospital, Wells Fargo Foundation, Charles and June Allen, and Congregation Beth Jacob all contributed generously to make this exhibition possible locally. The Sidney Knight Endowment also provided additional funding.
About The Curator
Recently announced as Curator of Contemporary Art, Jade Powers joins the Harn from the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri where she curated more than ten permanent collection and special exhibitions since being appointed as Assistant Curator in 2018. Exhibition highlights include Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives (2021), Well-Read: Artists Inspired by Literature (2021), Dawoud Bey: Selections from Night Coming Tenderly, Black (2020), and Deconstructing Marcus Jansen (2018). In her role, Powers implemented acquisitions of contemporary art, co-authored and managed the Dyani White Hawk exhibition catalog, and was instrumental in the launch of the Kemper’s new “Young Friends” collector group. Before joining the Kemper Museum, Powers was the 2017-2018 Romare Bearden Graduate Museum Fellow at the Saint Louis Art Museum. There, she created the first museum-wide gallery guide to comprehensively highlight works by artists of African descent and began research for the exhibition Shape of Abstraction (2019), showcasing a gift of more than 80 abstract works by African American artists. Powers implemented public programs including the panel If It Wasn’t for the Women: Science, Shape, and Self, as well as presented gallery talks, guided tours and created a teacher workshop to help educators add information about abstract art by African American artists to their curriculum.
About The Harn Museum Of Art
Since opening in 1990, the Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida has been a cornerstone of the North Central Florida arts and culture ecosystem. In addition to serving the students and faculty of the university, the Harn is the most prominent fine art museum in the greater north central Florida region and demonstrates its commitment to being a cultural resource through its free admission and art-centered experiences. The museum is known for developing high quality and relevant exhibitions–drawn from its collection of 13,300 artworks–many of which have toured across the United States. The Harn Museum of Art’s facility contains eleven galleries that feature dedicated space for each of its collecting areas (African, Asian, modern and contemporary art, and photography). Since the Harn’s opening, it has served more than 2.5 million visitors. The Harn continues to grow with the community by expanding its space for exhibitions and activities.
