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Self with Family, Jamaica

Artist Brooke Williams (American, born 1966)

Date1987

Mediuma composite of sixteen cyanotypes and tea-toned cyanotypes on deckled and cut wove paper

Dimensionssight: 131.3 × 187.2 cm (51 11/16 × 73 11/16 in.)

ClassificationsCollages / Assemblages

Credit LineGift of the Artist

Object number2015.46

Descriptioncyanotype and tea-toned cyanotype composite of sixteen prints on deckled and cut wove paper
Label Text"Cyanpotypes: Photography's Blue Period" In this cyanotype collage, Brooke Williams uses personal family photographs and quotations to describe coming of age as a Jamaican-American woman in the United States. By tinting the large photographic images with tea to make them brown instead of blue, Williams calls attention to the way skin tones are conventionally represented in Western traditions. The large portraits are framed with quotations from family letters, speeches by the controversial Jamaican Black Nationalist, Marcus Garvey, and other historical documents. Williams creates a cyanotype quilt that expresses the complexity of one woman’s journey into adulthood. "Us The Me | Race Ethnicity Identity" (2022) Williams often employs grids in her work. In Self with Family, the six large-format portraits were sourced from photographs she saved from a childhood trip to Jamaica. Williams used tannic acid to tone the trademark blue of cyanotypes to achieve a similar tint to her skin tone. Around the grid are excerpts from the work of Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey, the founder of the early-20th-century Pan-African movement. These are interspersed with lines from Williams’s journal and quotes from a New York Magazine interview with her father. In it, he outlines his dating expectations for his children with regard to interracial relationships and social class. The texts blend into one another, competing for the viewer’s attention. Together, they serve as a visual metaphor for Williams’s process of sifting through competing perspectives to find her voice.ProvenanceBrooke Williams

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