Lewis Watts: Photographs

Rena Bransten Gallery is pleased to present our second solo exhibition with Bay Area photographer Lewis Watts. With a keen interest in both historical and contemporary representations of people in the African diaspora, this exhibition includes portraits of artists, activist, authors, and musicians along with his photographs of historical, archival objects.

An avid traveler with an acute interest in people, Watts collects images everywhere he goes. His subjects are usually aware of his presence, and his engagement with them is paramount to the work. Watts’ photographs challenge the proliferation of negative images of black people propagated by news outlets, instead asserting a sense of “Black Joy,” a reference to the Black Joy Parade where he has taken many of his portraits. Through this work, Lewis pays homage to an exhibit of photographs compiled by W.E.B. Du Bois at the 1900 Paris Exposition that sought to counteract prevailing racist caricatures. Like Frederick Douglass, Du Bois recognized the power of photography in shaping public opinion.

Included in this grouping are works which continue Watts’ interest in the archive which began during a 2016 residency at The Amistad Center for Art and Culture in Hartford, CT. Watts’ work aims to look at the history of representations of African Americans, the motivations of the authors of those representations, and the narratives they wish to assert.

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz. He is the author of “Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era” (2017) and “New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition” (2013). His work has been exhibited at and is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; the UC Berkeley Art Museum, CA; he Citè de La Musique, Paris, France; the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; the Oakland Museum of California; and the Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, CT, among others.