The Closet As Archive explores the ways in which the concept of memory, beauty, and desire is essential to storytelling. My work looks at concepts of meaning in dress while considering migration, identity, and transformation.
Throughout the history of art and image-making, beauty as an aesthetic impulse has been simultaneously idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and identity has become increasingly complex within contemporary art and popular culture. My work challenges the relationship between beauty and desire by examining the representation as reinvention.
Beauty as an act is fraught with meanings and attitudes about class, race, gender, and aesthetics. I have a curiosity about the closet as a space where identities are formed, and the archive as a treasured space that holds underdeveloped secrets and ideas. Through a sequence of questions, I photograph items pulled out for the camera. They are loaded with narratives that give the garment or object a life of its own, containing stories of travel, family memory, and personal empowerment
The Closet As Archive explores the ways in which the concept of memory, beauty, and desire are essential to storytelling. Curator Kalia Brooks writes:
“The work shown in The Closet as Archive explores the innermost aspects of ourselves, symbolized through the closet space and archival boxes, and how we perform our identities based on how we desire to image ourselves to the world. By investigating the closet as a site where beauty, memory, and labor are enacted, this exhibition celebrates the closet as a space of empowerment for individuals authoring their own identities contrary to social or cultural convention.”
The photographs in the show include images from residential closets and photographic archives, garments found in collections, clothing that evokes personal and cultural identity, and closets and cabinets that store photographs.
By investigating the closet as a site where beauty, memory, and labor are enacted, this exhibition celebrates the closet as a space of empowerment for individuals authoring their own identities, contrary to social or cultural convention.
Artist Bios
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Dr. Deborah Willis
Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She has affiliated appointments with the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis and the Institute of Fine Arts, where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender. She is the director of NYU’s Center for Black Visual Culture/Institute of African American Affairs.
She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Dr. Willis’ curated exhibitions include: “Framing Moments” in the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, and “Free as They Want to Be: Artists Committed to Memory” at FotoFocus.
Dr. Willis was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and was a Richard D. Cohen Fellow in African and African American Art at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, and an Alphonse Fletcher Jr. Fellow. She was the Robert Mapplethorpe Photographer in Residence of the American Academy in Rome and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a recipient of the Don Tyson Prize for the Advancement of American Art by the Crystal Bridges Museum in 2022, was named the Mary Lucille Dauray Artist-in-Residence by the Norton Museum of Art, and taught her Master Class titled Home, Reimagining Interiority at Anderson Ranch in 2023.
Organizations
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United Photo Industries (UPI)
United Photo Industries (UPI) is a New York based nonprofit organization that works to promote a wider understanding of, and increased access to, the art of photography.
Since its founding in 2011, UPI has rapidly solidified its position in the public art landscape by continuing to showcase thought-provoking, challenging, and exceptional photography from across the globe. In its first seven years, UPI has presented the work of more than 2,500 visual artists in gallery exhibitions and public art installations worldwide.
The Closet As Archive
Featuring: Dr. Deborah Willis
Locations
View Location Details Download a detailed map of this location Brooklyn Bridge Park – Emily Warren Roebling Plaza1 Water St
Brooklyn, NY 11201
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