Author: Dr. Tanisha C. Ford in conversation with Dr. Tiffany E. Barber
Channel: San Francisco Public Library
Date: 2024-03-05

Dr. Tanisha Ford in conversation with Dr. Tiffany E. Barber on African American fashion culture and its influence on the past, present and future.

This conversation will contextualize the exhibit, Toward a Black Aesthetic: Kenneth P. Green Sr.'s  Photographs of the 1960s and 70s, on display in the Jewett Gallery and the African American Center through April 21, 2024. In this show, Green’s images pay homage to Black women whose strength, intellect and beauty he recognized through photographs that also highlight the fashion and politics of the era. 

The discussion will revolve around fashion themes discussed in Ford's books, Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (St. Martins, June 2019),  the award-winning Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015) and her latest book, Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement.

Dr. Tanisha Ford is Professor of History and Biography and Memoir at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has written four books, also including, Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful (Aperture, May 2019) and is currently working on a genre-bending book about sculptor and institution builder Augusta Savage. Ford has received several major awards and honors and was named one of The Root's 100 Most Influential African Americans. Her research has been supported by prestigious institutions such as New America, Emerson Collective, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ford Foundation, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and London University’s School of Advanced Study, among others. Tanisha writes regularly for diverse newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Atlantic, Time, ELLE, Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, The Root, Aperture, CBSNews, WNYC and NPR. A native of Indiana, she currently resides in Harlem.

Dr. Tiffany E. Barber is a prize-winning, internationally-recognized scholar, curator and critic whose writing and expert commentary appears in top-tier academic journals, popular media outlets and award-winning documentaries. Her work spans abstraction, dance, fashion, feminism, film and the ethics of representation, focusing on artists of the Black diaspora working in the United States and the broader Atlantic world. Her latest curatorial project, a virtual, multimedia exhibition for Google Arts and Culture, examines the value of Afrofuturism in times of crisis. She is currently Assistant Professor of African American Art at the University of California-Los Angeles as well as curator-in-residence at the Delaware Contemporary. Dr. Barber is the recipient of the Smithsonian’s 2022 National Portrait Gallery Director’s Essay Prize.