User:Tefoster/sandbox

Carla Williams (born 1965, Los Angeles, CA) is an American photographer, historian and writer who's work deals with race and representation in the photographic canon, as well as interrogating bias in societal paragons of beauty.

Early life
Carla Williams was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She studied visual arts and archeology at Princeton University, earning a BFA. Williams then earned a MA and MFA in Photography at the University of New Mexico. While still a graduate student at the University of New Mexico in the 1990s, Williams met artist and art historian Deborah Willis, with whom she began collaborating with on research projects and publications.

Work
Williams' photography has often taken the form of the self-portrait, through which she has documented herself at different ages, addressing issues of beauty norms and racial and gender representation. Her photography has been included in publications such as The New Yorker and exhibited at the Smithsonian Institute and the David C. Driskell Center for the Study of the Visual Arts and Culture of African Americans and the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Following graduate school, Williams worked as Curator of Prints and Photography at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Through her work at the Schomburg Center, Williams met and began a long-term collaboration with Deborah Willis. Williams and Willis co-wrote The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (2002) and later, Black Venus 2010: they called her "Hottentot" (2010).

Williams' has written extensively on the history of photography and Black Female subjectivity in art history, photography and the American popular culture for exhibition catalogs and publications such as Aperture Magazine and EBONY.

Collections
Her work is in the permanent collections at Harlem's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Allentown Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Arts and in the Museum of Arts and Design. Some of her crochet work was transformed into mosaics for the New York City Subway's 34th Street – Hudson Yards station.

2002

 * Xenobia Bailey: Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk--Phase IV (January 18 - February 17)

Honors and Awards
In 2000, Xenobia Bailey won a Creative Capital grant for her project, Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk.