

Artwork Image
Photo:
Controls
Barbara and Mother
Object Details
-
Date
2017, printed 2021
-
Object Type
Photographs
-
Medium
Inkjet print
-
Dimensions
Image: 68 7/8 x 55 in.
Sheet: 68 7/8 x 55 in. -
Edition
2/4
-
Inscriptions
[signature card on verso]
-
Credit Line
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas
-
Accession Number
P2021.44
-
Copyright
© Deana Lawson
Object Description
After meeting Barbara and her mother in a dollar store, Lawson photographed them in their home. They lean intimately against each other and smile warmly at the camera, surrounded by belongings that include video games, family heirlooms, awards, and a Bible. Even with meager resources, the women clearly cultivate beauty in their lives, conveyed by the lampshade cover, vase of artificial flowers, and careful attention to jewelry and nail polish, including a pedicure on the toes of the mother’s prosthetic leg.
Lawson’s carefully staged portraits are created in collaboration with her working-class Black subjects, disavowing a long history of ethnographic, stereotyped, and racist photographic imagery of Black communities. As writer Zadie Smith has described, “Outside a Lawson portrait you might be working three jobs, just keeping your head above water, struggling. But inside her frame you are beautiful, imperious, unbroken, unfallen.”
—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)
Additional details
Location: Off view
See more by Deana Lawson
Tags
Amon Carter Disclaimer
This information is published from the Carter's collection database. Updates and additions based on research and imaging activities are ongoing. The images, titles, and inscriptions are products of their time and are presented here as documentation, not as a reflection of the Carter’s values. If you have corrections or additional information about this object please email us to help us improve our records.
Every effort has been made to accurately determine the rights status of works and their images. Please email us if you have further information on the rights status of a work contrary or in addition to the information in our records.
Related Works
-
Untitled, 1970
Luchita Hurtado
Lithograph
1970.86 -
Running, West Fork near White Settlement Road, Trinity River, November 21, 2013, 2013
Terry Evans
Inkjet print
P2015.32.1 -
Wax Bodies, No. 108, 2007
Tanya Marcuse
Inkjet print
P2012.4.2.2.1 -
Vanishing Race 101, 2005
Larry McNeil
Inkjet print
P2016.87 -
Tonto's Earthen House, 2013
Larry McNeil
Inkjet print
P2016.84 -
Untitled #52, 2002
Laura Letinsky
Dye coupler print
P2007.3 -
Roseate Spoonbill, ca. 1980-85
Scott Gentling, Stuart Gentling
Graphite, opaque and transparent watercolor on paper
2018.26 -
East Baltimore, 2007
Anthony Hernandez
Inkjet print
P2012.4.1.1.1 -
Green Nude, ca. 1920
Gaston Lachaise
Crayon on paper
2018.4