2008 Lecture Series Speakers
-
Deb Willis has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Africana Studies. She was a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow and Fletcher Fellow, and a 2000 MacArthur Fellow, as well as the 1996 recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Foundation award. She has pursued a dual professional career as an art photographer and as one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curator of African American culture. Exhibitions of her work include: A Sense of Place, Frick, University of Pittsburgh, 2005; Regarding Beauty, University of Wisconsin, 2003; Embracing Eatonville, Light Works, Syracuse, NY, 2003-4; HairStories, Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum, Scottsdale, AZ 2003-4; The Comforts of Home, Hand Workshop Art Center, Richmond, VA, 1999; Re/Righting History: Counternarratives by Contemporary African-American Artists, Katonah Museum of Art, 1999; Memorable Histories and Historic Memories, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1998; Cultural Baggage, Rice University, Houston, TX, 1995. Her curated Exhibitions include: Engulfed by Katrina: Photographs before and After the Storm, Nathan Cummings Foundation, and Imagining Families—Images and Voices and Reflections in Black. Other notable projects include The Black Female Body A Photographic History with Carla Williams (Temple University Press, Philadephia, 2002); A Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and the Photographs from the Paris Exposition (Amistad Press, 2003); Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers - 1840 to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton); Visual Journal: Photography in Harlem and DC in the Thirties and Forties (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 1996); Picturing Us: African American Identity in Photography (The New Press, New York, NY, 1994); and VANDERZEE: The Portraits of James VanDerZee (Harry Abrams Publishing, New York, NY, 1993).
-
Robert (Bobby) Sengstacke was born May 29, 1943 at Provident Hospital, has 6 children form two marriages and currently resides in Chicago. For the past 51 years Robert A. Sengstacke, an award winning photojournalist has forged and maintained the line of cutting-edge photography and has become one of America's foremost photographic artists. His photographs have received national as well as international recognition and acclaim. His works featuring the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have been displayed at the Statue of Liberty. Other works have appeared at the renowned Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. The Schomburg Center, now part of the New York City Public Library system is a repository of 50 of Sengstacke’s King photographs and 20 of his works of the Nation of Islam. Sengstacke is noted as the first African-American photographer from Chicago to have a major exhibition to appear in Chicago's Loop at the main branch of the Chicago Public Library in 1969. The New York Times in 1987 during a review of his work defined him as "one of the most significant photographers of the Civil Rights generation."
His journey would take him on a quest that would lead him to become the Chicago Defender's head photographer and editor, Muhammad Speaks first non-Moslem staff photographer; Artist-in-residence at Fisk University; General Manager and Publisher of the Memphis Tri-State Defender; Photo assignments for Eastman-Kodak Co., and photographer for the Phil Donahue Show.
His photographs and profiles have appeared in LIFE, Ebony, Jet, Essence, The Washington Post and Spike Lee's School Daze as well as his poster of Dr. Martin Luther King that was featured on the set of Patti LaBelle's TV sitcom Out All Night.
Stanford University's History Department selected 100 of Sengstacke's photos that were used to chronicle the life and times of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Other Sengstacke works have been exhibited at The Smithsonian Institution; The DuSable Museum of African-American History, The Museum of Science of Industry, Spellman College, the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Chicago Campus the University of Illinois Urbana campus, the University of Wisconson and the University of Minnesota.
He also has been able to maintain a successful stock-photography business. With a shrewd knack for marketing and almost innate business acumen, Sengstacke has been able to broker agreements that have led to his historical works being exhibited throughout the world. Additionally, he maintains a video production company that has produced over 50 mini-documentaries in the past six years. His first frature length production “Portraits of Black Chicago,” won an award in Berlin Germany at the Black International Cinema in 2007.
-
Dawoud Bey began his career as a photographer in 1975 with a series of photographs, “Harlem, USA,” that were later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. He has since had numerous exhibitions worldwide, at such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art among many others. The Walker Art Center organized a mid-career survey of his work, “Dawoud Bey: Portraits 1975-1995,” that traveled to institutions throughout the United States and Europe. A major publication was also published in conjunction with the exhibition. Aperture recently published his latest project Class Pictures in September 2007 and has organized a traveling exhibition of this work that will tour museums throughout the country through 2010. It opens at the Indianapolis Museum of Art this month, and will also appear at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Bey’s highly acclaimed works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, both in the United States and abroad, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums world wide. He has been honored with numerous fellowships and awards over the course of his long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
His critical essays have appeared in publications throughout Europe and the United States, and he has curated exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally as well.
Dawoud Bey holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Yale University, and in recognition of his distinguished career he was recently appointed to the position of Distinguished College Artist and Professor of Photography at Columbia College Chicago, where has taught since 1998.
