Africa Is a Country

The Black Portrait Symposium

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

The Black Portrait Symposium

By
Sean Jacobs

Posing Beauty explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty has been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture such as music and the internet.

Throughout the  history of Western art and image-making, beauty as an aesthetic impulse has been simultaneously idealized and challenged, and the relationship between beauty and art has become increasingly complex within contemporary art and popular culture. This exhibit further challenges the relationship between beauty and art by examining the representation of beauty as a racialized act fraught with meanings and attitudes about class, gender, and aesthetics.

In the first of four 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 and Image, questions the ways in which our contemporary understanding of beauty has been constructed and framed through the body. The last two thematic sections, Objectivity vs. Subjectivity, and Codes of Beauty, invite a deeper reading 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.

Posing Beauty problematizes our contemporary understanding of beauty by framing the notion of aesthetics, race, class, and gender within art, popular culture, and political contexts.  This exhibit features approximately 90 works drawn from public and private collections and will be accompanied by a book published by W.W. Norton.

Artists in the exhibition include: Eve Arnold, Anthony Barboza [that’s his portrait of Marvin Hagler above], Sheila Pree Bright, Renee Cox, Bruce Davidson, Leonard Freed, Lee Friedlander, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Alex Harsley, Jessica Ingram, Lauren Kelley, Russell Lee, Builder Levy, Elaine Mayes, Jeffrey Scales, Jamel Shabazz, Stephen Shames, Mickaline Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, Carla Williams, Garry Winogrand and Ernest Withers, among others.

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Further Reading

After the uprising

Years into Cameroon’s Anglophone conflict, the rebellion faces internal fractures, waning support, and military pressure—raising the question of what future, if any, lies ahead for Ambazonian aspirations.

In search of Saadia

Who was Saadia, and why has she been forgotten? A search for one woman’s story opens up bigger questions about race, migration, belonging, and the gaps history leaves behind.

Binti, revisited

More than two decades after its release, Lady Jaydee’s debut album still resonates—offering a window into Tanzanian pop, gender politics, and the sound of a generation coming into its own.

The bones beneath our feet

A powerful new documentary follows Evelyn Wanjugu Kimathi’s personal and political journey to recover her father’s remains—and to reckon with Kenya’s unfinished struggle for land, justice, and historical memory.

What comes after liberation?

In this wide-ranging conversation, the freedom fighter and former Constitutional Court justice Albie Sachs reflects on law, liberation, and the unfinished work of building a just South Africa.

The cost of care

In Africa’s migration economy, women’s labor fuels households abroad while their own needs are sidelined at home. What does freedom look like when care itself becomes a form of exile?

The memory keepers

A new documentary follows two women’s mission to decolonize Nairobi’s libraries, revealing how good intentions collide with bureaucracy, donor politics, and the ghosts of colonialism.

Making films against amnesia

The director of the Oscar-nominated film ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ reflects on imperial violence, corporate warfare, and how cinema can disrupt the official record—and help us remember differently.