Its the weekend….BAY-BAYYYY!! Hope everyone will be having a great Labor Day Weekend.

Here’s a wonderful African-American female photographer that I’m sure everyone is familiar with:
Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe

Photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe was born on July 9, 1951 in Chicago, Illinois. Art has been a life-long pursuit for Moutoussamy-Ashe. Her parents, an interior designer and an architect, encouraged her artistic side. Taking advantage of the opportunities available to them living in Chicago, she began her formal training at age eight when her parents enrolled her in classes at the Art Institute of Chicago. When it was time for higher education, Moutoussamy-Ashe moved east to New York and received her B.F.A. degree in photography from The Cooper Union. Graduating in 1975, she worked as a graphic artist and photojournalist for WNBC-TV.

Starting in 1976, Moutoussamy-Ashe has had frequent group and solo exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world including the Leica Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York; the Smithsonian and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.; Galerie Herve Odermat in Paris and The Excelsior in Florence among others. Publications such as Life Magazine, The New York Times, People and the Associated Press have also featured her photography, disseminating it to a wider audience. At the turn of the century, she hosted the documentary Crucible of the Millennium, which PBS broadcast nationwide.

Moutoussamy-Ashe has found the time to teach photography at the high school and college level and to lecture about it at many educational and cultural institutions. Outside of the field of photography, she has been continually involved in philanthropic pursuits involving various social, health and community issues. She is the director of the Arthur Ashe Endowment of the Defeat of AIDS, a former trustee of her alma mater, The Cooper Union, and a one-time Alternate Representative of the U.S. to the United Nations, a presidential appointment.

Rather than standing in opposition to her photographic work, these altruistic endeavors have enriched it, exposing her to new locations, frameworks of thought and experiences. This can be seen in her photographs which contain strong narrative and documentary elements. Additionally, Moutoussamy-Ashe has displayed a proclivity toward focusing her lens on the African/African American experience. This is evident in the three full collections documenting her travels in West Africa or her book about the Gullah community of South Carolina, Daufuskie Island: A Photographic Essay.

She reveals her immediate personal experience in Daddy and Me, which features photos of her late husband, Arthur Ashe, and her daughter, Camera. She has published numerous books featuring not only her own work, but also that of unknown black photographers of the past. In 2001, her fourth book of photographs was published, titled The African Flower: The Singing of Angels. The narrative of her photographs extends beyond one picture, beyond even a series of pictures, to create a greater context for the artist herself within photography, womanhood and the black American experience.