The Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture

Anthony Aziz (b. 1961, USA) and Sammy Cucher (b. 1958, Peru) have been a collaborative team since 1992, after meeting as graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. They are members of the Fine Arts faculty at Parsons School of Design/The New School and live in Brooklyn.

Their interdisciplinary work is project-based and idea-driven, with outcomes ranging from video and photography to screenprinting, digital animation, sculpture and large-scale jacquard tapestries. The images, objects and installations they produce are meant to reflect on the boundaries of identity at a time when these are becoming increasingly fluid and undefined.

Aziz + Cucher have exhibited their work extensively, including at the 46th Venice Biennale, MASS MoCA, Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles, the Biennale de Lyon, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the List Visual Art Center at MIT, the National Gallery of Berlin, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, among others.

An artist monograph marking the 30th anniversary of their artistic collaboration was published by La Fábrica Editions (Madrid) in 2022 and will be available in the U.S. in May, 2023. It includes more than 130 color reproductions of their work as well as insightful essays by independent curator Agustín Perez Rubio and cultural critic Aruna D’Souza, as well as a conversation with pioneering digital artist Lynn Hershman Leeson.

Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African American men from their initial calls to arms, many of the men who eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture blossomed—marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, Deborah Willis explores the crucial role of photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has largely gone unacknowledged.

With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also includes stories of other African Americans involved with the struggle—from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and examines them together to address themes of love and longing; responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and—most predominantly—African American resilience.

The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African American communities in the development and prosecution of the war. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to individual and collective struggles for citizenship and remembrance.

Deborah Willis, PhD, is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present, among others. Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: "Framing Moments in the KIA," "Migrations and Meanings in Art", "Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography; Out of Fashion Photography; Framing Beauty at the Henry Art Gallery and "Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments" at Indiana University.

About the Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture

This lecture series honors the legacy of Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. (November 4, 1921 – January 14, 1987). Wagstaff attended the Institute of Fine Arts in the 1950s, studying Italian Renaissance Art under Richard Offner, and went on to become a notable American art curator, collector, and patron of the arts. Through his influential collecting, teaching, and curatorial work, Wagstaff promoted photography as a fine art medium. His groundbreaking collection was purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984, constituting the cornerstone of its newly formed Department of Photographs. Sam Wagstaff’s devotion to the medium contributed to its rising status over the years. We are delighted to celebrate his achievements by naming our annual photography lecture in his honor.

The Institute of Fine Arts is pleased to announce that Hank Willis Thomas will give the inaugural Sam Wagstaff Photography Lecture in conversation with New York based artist, Chris Berntsen.

Hank Willis Thomas is a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work is included in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2018), Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), the Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), and is a former member of the New York City Public Design Commission.

Chris Berntsen is a New York based artist who uses photography to explore themes related to queerness, identity, and intimacy. Chris' work has been exhibited in MoMA PS1, Aperture Foundation, New York, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. He received his BFA from New York University's Tisch School of Arts and is an MFA candidate at Hunter College, New York. He has worked alongside artist Hank Willis Thomas for the past fourteen years.