Deborah Willis
Artist's Statement
"What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers* time? In our great-grandmothers* day?.... How was the creativity of the black woman kept alive, year after year and century after century, when, for most of the years black people have been it was a punishable crime for a black person to read or write? And the freedom to paint, to sculpt, to expand the mind with action did not exist."1
So writes Alice Walker in her essay "In Search of Our Grandmothers Gardens." Walker asks the reader to imagine these questions in a provocative voice. She asks us to explore the possibilities of these experiences and reinvest in black female agency as a way of locating an identity of the black female artist in history. I have for sometime referenced my own family in my art work by making photographs, photo quilts and installations about their lives.
I share this story as an introduction to how I use photographs, family albums and as well as my own photographs to make constructed and fabricated histories about black women and women. I recall my own childhood in North Philadelphia in the mid-1950s with great detail. I especially remember when I was required to finish the ironing before I was allowed to go a Saturday matinee. The women in my extended family shared weekly chores, gossiping the time away in my mother*s beauty shop, sometimes about my aunts and cousins who were washerwomen (as were the majority of urban female day workers in the 1880s.)
Today, I stitch autobiographical quilts, combining family photographs, fabric, mementos and text. One of my quilts focusing on the domestic work of women in my family is descriptively titled, "Thursday and Every Other Friday Off" and subtitled "No man of her own."(1996). It is a tribute to my maternal great-aunt, Annie Chappelle. She was a striking woman with a smile that would light up a room; she was also domestic live-in worker whom I often photographed when I was young. Prompted by one of those photographs, I searched my family album for other photographs that would support the story of the quilt. The memory of my aunt and her work experience evoked by the one photograph generated another kind of search. I looked for historical moments in photographs to link her personal story to other black women, women working in the cotton fields during slavery. I linked the historical past with my own personal history. In doing that I become the storyteller, the spectator and the artist.
I employ the quilting tradition to create my artwork because, historically, my family have always been quilters and storytellers. My maternal grandmother had 13 children and recycled clothing, blankets and other hand-me-downs until they were no longer recognizable in their original form. Then she would make quilts of the salvageable items. She gave quilts to all of her children and some of her older grandchildren throughout her 88 years. She died in 1990.
My paternal great-aunt, Cora, was also a quilter, as well as a ceramist and canner. Visiting her as a child in the early 1950s I marveled at the fact that she called herself an artist. Aunt Cora lived in Philadelphia until the mid-1970s. Then she moved back to her birth place in Virginia and became known as the "lady canner and quilter." She died in 1986.
My work is influenced by both these three important women and my parents. As a young man, my father had dreamed of being a tailor. His interest in tailoring and stitching fascinated me because not he was a macho man who pieced together seemingly difficult pieces to create wonderful fashions.
My mother was, and still is a hairdresser. I spent many hours sitting around listening to the stories of the women who were live-ins and day-workers who came on Fridays and Saturdays to get their hair straightened, curled and dyed for Sunday church services. They often spoke freely about the women they worked for and shared stories that were both humorous and humiliating encounters with their employers. The photographs I made of the women in our family wearing colorful and stylish hats are also used within my story quilts. Family photographs are my reference in which to construct a family story*the narrative shifts with each memory from other family members.
My photographs preserve these collective memories. Creating visual diaries through photo quilts allows me to visually tell stories in the tradition of African American story quilts. Quilts remind us who we are and how our ancestors have influenced us and the larger society. I continue to photograph and use my own family photographs and archival references to incorporate stories and social politics into my art, inviting a larger public imagine these experiences--both collective and individual--of African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I often think about my own experiences and imagine those of other black women artists who are considering and reconsidering their own images. In doing so it forces me to question what we have imagined about black women and what has been represented about them. We are subsequently become aware of the visual by decoding past and present images of black women.
One curator describes my work as follows: "By inscribing quilts and photography with each other*s history as well as her own, Willis creates a new history where gender, race, family history and the media are web-like in the way that they inform and transform definitions of each other."2
By telling my story, I make it possible for others to visually consider the shared experiences of many black women workers, many who had/have their own cottage industries*as laundresses, hair care specialists/beauticians, daycare providers and personal trainers. Collective and individual memories are the foundation for my work. I am concerned with the present and its linkage to the past; identity through its connection to community and ideas that are fully imagined through spirituality and the art making process.
In the "Bodybuilder Series" what I am trying to do is focus on the female body, contextualized and situated in the present, pointing to how work is manifested physically in the black female body, shorn of covering, and developed and amplified in muscles and tendon, shoulders and calfs. The depiction of physical work and its impact on the development of the body has oftentimes been relegated to men and, thus, the world of physical work is constructed as one that is gender specific. Ths series attempts to speak to that notion and how the black female body, if viewed under the lens of actual work, deconstructs and re-configures the image of women, pointing to literal strength, and not figurative, emotionally-specific moments.
1 Alice Walker, "In Search of Our Grandmothers'
Gardens," in The Norton Anthology:
African American Literature p. 2380.
2 Alison Ferris in Memorable Histories and Historic
Memories, Bowdoin College Museum
of Art, 1998, p.31.