Kwame Brathwaite: Black Is Beautiful

Kwame Brathwaite is represented by Philip Martin in Los Angeles. Beginning in the early 1960s, Brathwaite photographed stories for black publications such as the New York Amsterdam News, City Sun, and Daily Challenge, helping set the stage for the Black Arts and Black Power movements. By the 1970s, Brathwaite was one of the era's top concert photographers, shaping the images of such public figures as Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, James Brown, and Muhammad Ali. Brathwaite wrote about and photographed such landmark events as the the Motortown Revue at the Apollo (1963); Wattstax '72 (1972); the Jackson 5's first trip to Africa (1974); and the festival "Zaire '74," which accompanied the famous Foreman-Ali fight, the "Rumble in the Jungle." Recent acquirers of Brathwaite's work include the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College.

Deborah Willis is an artist, writer, and curator, as well as professor and chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She has been a Richard D. Cohen Fellow of African and African American Art History at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University (2014), a Guggenheim Fellow (2005), a Fletcher Fellow (2005), and a MacArthur Fellow (2000). Willis received the NAACP Image Award in 2014 for her coauthored book Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery (2013). Her other notable publications include Black Venus 2010: They Called Her "Hottentot" (2010), Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009), the award-winning Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (2009), The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (2002), and Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present (2002).