BAM and Aperture Present Moderated Discussion The New Black Vanguard

 

On November 13, Brooklyn Academy Of Music (BAM) and Aperture will present The New Black Vanguard, a talk moderated by writer and critic Antwaun Sargent as he engages with the work of four emerging and established Black photographers who are pushing the fashion industry towards an inclusive future. The featured photographers-Arielle Bobb-Willis, Micaiah Carter, Tyler Mitchell, and Dana Scruggs - join Sargent as they consider their photography in the collection and the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image. The evening celebrates the launch of Sargent's The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion. The richly illustrated book addresses the radical transformation taking place in fashion, art, and the visual vocabulary around beauty and the body. The evening will also include an audience Q&A and book signing.

Antwaun Sargent is a writer and critic living and working in New York City. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, W, Vogue, and other publications. He has contributed essays to museum and gallery publications on Ed Clark, Mickalene Thomas, Arthur Jafa, Deborah Roberts, and Yinka Shonibare, among other artists. Sargent has lectured and participated in public conversations with artists at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, MCA Denver, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Harvard and Yale universities. He has also co-organized a number of exhibitions, including The Way We Live Now at Aperture, Then and Now: Chase Hall and Cameron Welch at Jenkins Johnson Projects, and the traveling exhibition Young, Gifted and Black. His first book The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion is out October 2019 and will be accompanied by a traveling exhibition.

Arielle Bobb-Willis was born and raised in New York City, with pit stops in South Carolina and New Orleans. Bobb-Willis has been using the camera for nearly a decade as a tool of empowerment. Battling with depression from an early age, Bobb-Willis found solace behind the lens and has developed a visual language that speaks to the therapeutic benefits of creativity. Her work can be seen in a group show in December 2019 at the Foam Photography Museum in Amsterdam.

Brooklyn-based photographer, Micaiah Carter's work is a singular alchemy of contemporary youth culture, fine art, and street style combined with his certainty that the simple act of representation can be a force for change. His work contains echoes of the Black Power movement and the work of Carrie Mae Weems, Viviane Sassen, Jamel Shabazz, and Alasdair McLellan. Carter is currently working on his first monograph, 95 48, inspired by photographs of his dad and his friends from the 1970s.

Tyler Mitchell is a photographer and filmmaker based in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in British Vogue, American Vogue, i-D, Dazed, and The New York Times. His commercial clients include Calvin Klein, Givenchy, and Converse. His first self-published book, El Paquete (2015), documents the architecture and skateboard scenes in Havana. He was the first Black photographer to shoot the cover of Vogue in 2018, and in 2019 he was included on Forbes' "30 Under 30" list.

Dana Scruggs is a New York-based photographer, originally from the South Side of Chicago. In 2016 she launched Scruggs Magazine, a print publication dedicated to her vision of the male form, and in 2018 she had her industry breakthrough shooting ESPN's Body Issue in 2018, becoming the first Black female photographer to photograph an athlete for the publication. Later that year, she became the first Black person to photograph the cover of Rolling Stone in its 50-year history. Her clients include Apple, Nike, The New York Times, GQ, and Essence.