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carla

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Carla Williams: Circa 1985 at Higher Pictures (Brooklyn, NY)

“I don’t remember when I first decided to take off my clothes for the camera. I know it was in that first year of photography classes, probably the first semester. The contact sheets showed me experimenting with stages of undress. Tights on. Tights off. Leg up. Smile. Wink. I figured I knew what to do, since I’d seen it played out for years. I never showed the pictures to anyone. They looked nothing like the magazines, but they sure looked like me, and I was thrilled. I was seeing exalted nudes every day in art history class, but I didn’t want to be Charis Wilson; I wanted to be Edward Weston and Charis Wilson in one. I knew I needed more technical sophistication, and that I had launched into something I hadn’t yet begun to understand. I put away those negatives and contact sheets for more than thirty years. But I kept photographing. And I never fully put my clothes back on.”

Carla Williams, Tender

Carla Williams: Circa 1985 at Higher Pictures (Brooklyn, NY)

Williams’ images are at once tender and wise, awkward and exhilarating. They reflect a young woman’s burgeoning sexuality and expansive curiosity about the medium. As a Black woman processing a canonical history that positioned so many models, girlfriends, and wives as muses to their photographic ‘masters,’ Williams did not see herself reflected in any of the history books’ most revered images. She was nevertheless absorbing a classic, timeless aesthetic of female representation.

(Higher Picture Press Release)

Words for Tatter on Brooklyn Museum's Africa Fashion Exhibit

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Image courtesy of Danny Perez, Installation view, Africa Fashion. Brooklyn Museum, June 23 – October 22, 2023

I walked through the doors of the Brooklyn Museum feeling the weight of the world amid current events in Israel and Palestine. Reflecting on the state of our divided global society. Pleas for freedom in my heart and mind. And once again, grappling with the complex emotions that come with being a Black American woman from the South who is a descendant of enslaved people and sharecroppers covering fashion and style from Africa. A Black American woman from a working-class family. A Black American woman with the privilege of having an education from one of the best research institutions in the United States. A Black American woman who is acutely aware of her existence in a racialized world and colonized body. A Black American woman who, like writer and academic Saidiya Hartman, is stuck between two worlds, both of which I am a stranger. 

rice fills the belly, but sky fills the heart

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“The water spirit cautioned the woman that now since the color blue had come down to earth to stay, it was a sacred duty to guard the indigo and that only women should handle the indigo pots. The woman was to carry her new knowledge back to the village and instruct the women there how to make the blue juice live happily in the cloth for all the people.” 

How Indigo Came to Libéra, adapted by the artist

My process for the social practice installation is research-based and embodies many components that contribute to the whole but are not central to the final piece. If the viewer looks to the aesthetic to inform the meaning and process, they won't find it.

However, with additional probing -- Why indigo? How was it made? Who made it? Why are we participants? -- the viewer may discover the work's contextual richness. 

From the participatory component to the women who labored together to make "the indigo live happily in the cloth for all the people” to the folklore, How indigo dye came to Liberia that inspired the collaborative work there is an unfixing and coming together happening.

My work with indigo is also a meditation on its fraught history, a history that includes the labor of enslaved Africans and colonial cultivation and extraction of a natural resource for profit. Considering all the above, the final piece engenders the possibilities of working together against systems of domination.