Williamstown, MA—Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA) will present a gallery talk by Michelle Lamunière, curator of the exhibition You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé. Ms. Lamunière is a curatorial assistant in the Department of Photographs at the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University. Her gallery talk will take place on Saturday, August 16, 2003, at 3 p.m. in the WCMA galleries.

“Our museum has a long tradition of presenting exhibitions featuring new scholarship, and we are very pleased to bring to Williamstown Michelle Lamunière’s groundbreaking exhibition You Look Beautiful Like That,” says Associate Director John Stomberg. “Portraits always reveal the values of the people on both sides of the camera. By virtue of being portraits of Malians made by Malians, these wonderfully complex photographs give a sense of the rich diversity of the sitter’s personalities—not to mention the brilliant visions of Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta.”

A Scholar of Photography

Ms. Lamunière is a scholar of contemporary photography and the history of photography. She has curated exhibitions at the Fogg Art Museum, as well as at the Boston University Art Gallery. She has given presentations on photography and on You Look Beautiful Like That around the U.S. and in Europe, including at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C., and National Portrait Gallery, London.

Exhibition Overview

You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé highlights the work of Keïta and Sidibé, commercial photographers who worked in Bamako, Mali, from the 1940s to the 1970s. Since the early 1990s, they have received international recognition for their remarkable and engaging portraits of members of their local community. The exhibition will be open until August 31, 2003. The title of this exhibition comes from a favorite expression in Bambara, the language widely spoken in Mali. “You look beautiful like that” reflects the photographers’ goal of making their subjects look good. The exhibition features 72 black-and-white images, the bulk of which are modern enlargements made from the photographers’ original negatives.

You Look Beautiful Like That: The Portrait Photographs of Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé has been organized by the Fogg Art Museum. A 116-page catalogue, written by Ms. Lamunière, published by the Harvard University Art Museums, and distributed by Yale University Press, accompanies the exhibition and is available in WCMA’s Museum Shop.

Publicity Images Available

Several of the portraits in You Look Beautiful Like That are available for use. Publicity images for You Look Beautiful Like That and other exhibitions can be found at www.wcma.org/press.

The Williams College Museum of Art is open Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, from 1 to 5 p.m. Admission is free and the museum is wheelchair accessible.

Contact: Jonathan Cannon, Public Relations Coordinator
413.597.3178; WCMA@williams.edu