West Chapter ConferenceSpeakers

Lewis Watts

Saturday, November 02, 2019 @ 7:30pm, de Saisset Museum Auditorium

Honored Educator Talks

Lewis Watts is a photographer, archivist/curator, visual historian and Professor Emeritus of Art at UC Santa Cruz. He also taught at UC Berkeley (and other places) for over 40 years. His research and art practice center around the "cultural landscape" and the inhabitants of that landscape primarily in communities in the African diaspora. He is the author of "Harlem of the West: The San Francisco Fillmore Jazz Era" Chronicle Books 2006, Heyday Books 2020, "New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition" UC Press 2013 and "Portraits" Edition One Books 2019. His work has been exhibited at and is in the collections of The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Citè de La Musique, Paris France, The Berkeley Museum, Autograph London, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, The Oakland Museum of California, The Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase NY, The Amistad Center for Art and Culture, Hartford, Conn, Light Work, Syracuse NY, The Paul Sack Collection, San Francisco, The Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco among others. He recently been working on photographic projects on the Black Presence in France, Mining the Archive and a portrait series of photographs of people of African descent who present themselves to the world in ways counter to negative media depictions.