Visible Bodies: Representing Blackness

Drawn from the Loeb’s permanent collection, this exhibition centers the tension between visibility and invisibility, inherent to the medium of photography, through works by Black American artists. Throughout its history, photography has held the powerful promise of making the world more visible, yet it has also been a powerful tool of erasure. Contemporary Black artists have used the conventions of photographic portraiture to call attention to mainstream refusals of Black humanity and opportunity in the United States. These works exemplify artists’ creative uses of photography to resist colonization, inequity, disenfranchisement, and brutality. Both artists and subjects have engaged with photography as a performative medium in which identity is constructed and negotiated, rather than assigned and fixed.

This exhibition was generously supported by the Hoene Hoy Photography Fund.